Philip Sheldrake

Software 4.0 — A New Neurosymbolic AI

Thu, 04 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve reached an uncanny milestone in tech. We are building intimate conversational bonds with AI chatbots, yet the software infrastructure surrounding our daily lives remains as rigid, silent, and fragile as ever.

LLMs tease us with their facilities to write code, but forcing this new form of intelligence to work with programming paradigms that pre-date the World Wide Web is driving a silent crisis of structural decay in large-scale software systems.

This post introduces the Software 4.0 era. Informed by biological processes, it turns software into a living, self-verifying organism that provides the perfect complement to LLMs. It transforms how we build and co-evolve the digital fabric of our world.

Something Big Could Be Happening: A response to Matt Shumer's post

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A 2022 article in Noema magazine describes apophenia as “faulty pattern recognition. People see faces in clouds and alien ruins on Mars. … Humans are pattern-recognizing creatures, and so apophenia is built in.”

A Google engineer had claimed an LLM to be conscious, sentient, and indeed a person, and the article explores reasons for why he had reached such a conclusion. It’s well worth a read, particularly its observation that we apply concepts that have wholly anthropomorphic heritage and meaning to LLM technology. Pehaps we need new vocabulary.

The technology’s stochastic prowess is much advanced 42 months later, and perhaps that’s all the more reason we continue to see things that aren’t there. Matt Shumer’s “Something Big Is Happening ” is the latest example.

Supersoftware — software that is itself symbolic AI

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Trillions of dollars are flowing into LLM technology and services — that’s not an exaggeration — and yet LLMs can’t grapple with enterprise software. When we invite them to code, to update schemas, to modify configurations, they break things. Constantly.

But this isn’t an LLM problem. It’s a software problem.

Transition9 — the natural integration of human and next-level artificial intelligence

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’m never quite sure if the phrase is that we’re blessed or we’re cursed to live in interesting times. Either way, we’re definitely here and it’s definitely interesting.

Both the internet and the web were designed purposefully to be decentralized. No-one could take control let alone turn them off. Since then we’ve witnessed many power grabs — from privately owned social networks to nation states ‘protecting’ their citizens — interspersed with a series of community action and associated projects to re-decentralize things.

Decentralizing done well is a means to some very welcome ends, but it has proven to be a harder design challenge than centralizing. And just as you think you’re making progress, along comes the next centralizing innovation.

Addresso — your web3 address book, and a bit more besides

Fri, 21 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve needed purpose-designed address books for every technological wave, from the postage stamp to cell phone numbers. Web3 is no exception.

Yet any old address book simply won’t cut it when it comes to web3. As a valuable part of the decentralized web, there are certain things you just have to get right.

Addresso is the first purpose-built web3 address book that isn’t welded to a specific wallet application. We’ve designed it so we can say with just a hint of pride:

Addresso is yours
You have sole control
It runs solely on your devices
The data lives only on your devices
It’s always encrypted with your passphrase
You sign additions and changes for complete security.

Reusable KYC: when a dedication to decentralization self-sabotages

Thu, 02 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Are we our own worst enemy?

Originally posted to the generative identity website .

Once more with meaning — a review of a draft industry paper on human-centric digital identity

Tue, 15 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The paper falls far short in its appreciation for human-centred design, and this is quite typical of contemporary approaches to digital identity.

Originally posted to the generative identity website .

Live or DIE — a review of a draft industry paper on the harms of SSI

Mon, 30 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Dear lawmakers and regulators, this draft industry paper doesn’t do the job. I explain why in the hope that you will act.

First published to the generative identity website .

Web3's future #fail is avoidable

Sun, 06 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The point of failure is precisely where Web3 technology meets you and me. We must change our approach, not just to avoid failure, but to fully explore and expand the gifts of being human.

First published to the generative identity website .

Digital identity is not human identity, and that matters

Thu, 14 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

If your work involves architecting or designing or developing or policymaking for the interweave of people and digital technologies, or researching the consequences, may I invite you to check out my new essay: Human identity — the number one challenge in computer science .

Wonderfully, I’ve been helped by thirteen reviewers offering more than two hundred questions and suggestions over six months. The work has been funded 🙏🏼 by the AKASHA Foundation , and is co-published with the brilliant Kernel community. Here’s a very quick outline …

We need to talk about the social graph

Mon, 28 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

First published to the AKASHA blog .

Who doesn’t love a good concept?! Concepts are the fundamental building blocks of thinking, of designing. While there are plenty of things in the mix when it comes to contemplating system design, if the primary concepts remain unchallenged and unchanged from what came before, then the outcome will likely look very familiar. If you want system change , start with changing the paradigm — the system of concepts and patterns that form the worldview.

By way of a quick example, if the economy of your new system picks up on the concepts collectively known as capitalism — e.g. private ownership, capital accumulation, scarcity — then perhaps it should not be a huge surprise when your new system turns out to be capitalist too. New code. Same concepts. Familiar outcome.

Technological decentralization isn’t magic dust. Merely decentralizing the technical structures or components manifesting a concept is no guarantee of different outcomes; technological decentralizing doesn’t even guarantee decentralization.

So with that said, this post is about a concept known as “the social graph”.

AKASHA Conversations #3 — An idea called fractal localism

Fri, 25 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

First published to the AKASHA blog .

Our monthly AKASHA Conversations explore critical facets of decentralized social networking, with a focus this quarter at least on all things moderating. We welcomed Murat Ayfer as our expert speaker last month.

Murat is our kind of guy. Having experienced the lows, highs, and more lows of moderating a 60k+ member community, he has been thinking of ways to make moderating more scalable, so that decentralized social networking is more scalable. But more than thinking — he has been coding too, as you can see at https://beta.spiel.com/ .

Scalability refers to the ease with which a system can adjust its size, its capacity, as needed. There’s no doubting that computing resource is now fully scalable, almost trivially so, but humans don’t work the same as machines. I make this point quite often. In digital identity for example, machine identity is quite different from the digital mediation and augmentation of human identity in digitalised social networks. In our context here, centralized social networking scales people in ways that are proving, increasingly, to lead to very poor outcomes. Decentralized social networking very likely needs to learn more from the social sciences than, say, Facebook.

AKASHA Conversations #2 — Lessons from moderating web2 social networks

Tue, 25 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

First published to the AKASHA blog .

Here’s how we set up the second AKASHA Conversation …

Where does #web3 go after #DeFi? It gets social! 💫 And the difference between social and antisocial = new designs for moderating.

You can read about the first Conversation in this series on moderating here FYI, and I will just borrow the bit that describes what it’s all about …

AKASHA Conversations is a regular webinar exploring the critical questions of decentralized social networking, with expert presentations informing and inspiring open dialogue and action.

We were delighted to be joined in Conversation #2 by Joseph Seering , a postdoctoral scholar in Computer Science at Stanford University. Joseph focuses on the social and organizational dynamics of moderation systems, and pulled out some wonderful insights from his many years of studying the art and science of moderating.

AKASHA Conversations #1 — Designing for moderating decentralized social networks

Tue, 14 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

First published to the AKASHA blog .

AKASHA Conversations is a regular webinar exploring the critical questions of decentralized social networking, with expert presentations informing and inspiring open dialogue and action. To put it another way, AKASHA Conversations is designed to foster the collective design of decentralized conversation.

Decentralized social networking is, effectively, the design for decentralized and civilized information exchange — conversation and other forms of interaction. Immediately adjacent to that of course is then the facility to code for (in the combined technological and sociological sense) whatever agreements have been reached through conversation.

The past, present, and possible future of software architecture

Fri, 09 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

It is important to understand the ways in which software may be conjured into the world for the simple reason that software and information technologies more generally have immense social and economic impact. The genesis of such process has been called software architecture, and there have been various attempts over the years to define the term and corresponding activities precisely, specifically in relation to the elements, forms, rationale, and constraints involved (“What Is Your Definition of Software Architecture?,” 2017).

A well-defined understanding of software architecture is critical to its practice and perhaps the word choice alone has helped sustain a certain nature of software architectural practice akin to that undertaken for buildings. The definitional approach taken by Perry and Wolf (1992) is typical of the traditional genre, drawing parallels with the precursors of hardware and network architecture, and their forerunner, the architecture of the built environment.

Samuel Butler (1912) observed:

Analogy points in this direction, and though analogy is often misleading, it is the least misleading thing we have.

To what degree are we misled by the architectural analogy? And might we find a better analogy, that is one that’s less misleading?

Self-Sovereign Identity — the book, the dystopia

Wed, 26 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

First published to the AKASHA blog .

Manning Publications has just published “Self-Sovereign Identity: Decentralized digital identity and verifiable credentials”.

[caption id=“attachment_31144” align=“aligncenter” width=“739”] ISBN-13: 978-1617296598 / ISBN-10: 1617296597[/caption]

Congratulations to the co-editors, Alex Preukschat and Drummond Reed, for getting 24 chapters, 5 appendices, and a further 11 online-only chapters out the door. No mean feat. My copy will drop on the doormat any day now.

For the uninitiated, here’s a link to the Wikipedia entry for self-sovereign identity (SSI), although it doesn’t yet reflect the caution recorded in the Internet Policy Review glossary .

Of the book’s 35 chapters, 34 explain the technologies and motivations and celebrate SSI’s application. Here is a book written almost entirely by authors with skin in the SSI game, both reputational and financial, dedicated to making sure you understand why SSI was intended to be a good thing, why exactly it is in fact a good thing, and how it will be awesome in its real-world application.

With my AKASHA Research hat firmly donned and our purpose and values front of mind, I got to write the other chapter, the only dissenting chapter. It’s one of those chapters relegated from the main book, but it is available online to all purchasers. It’s the one titled …

Two Concepts of Liberty and Infinite Permutations of Moderating

Fri, 16 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

First published to the Ethereum World blog .

Our first blog post on the myths and challenges of social network moderating and the direction we’re heading in for decentralized social networking elicited some agreeable feedback but also this response:

“I don’t agree with your views about moderation. We’re building blockchains for freedom.”

Have you ever had that feeling where your communication simply fell flat despite your sincere best efforts?! 😞 Where your carefully constructed words didn’t appear to make the slightest dint?! Sure you have, you’re human too.

Similarly, we’ve all conveyed abrupt disagreement. This is the natural to-and-fro of conversation, and it demands mutual respect and enthusiasm for the potential benefits of mutual understanding.

How then should I respond to my responder? The response was private communication, so let’s call him Bob. I find myself asking …

What exactly does Bob mean by “freedom”?

In the earlier post I write that AKASHA celebrates freedom of speech and freedom of attention equally. And I also noted our longing for freedom from the crèches of centralized social networks. But Bob is “building blockchains for freedom” and appears to consider this different from rather than aligned with our direction.

Can I find an explanation for this and reconcile perceived differences? 🤝

Towards a shared understanding of ‘digital identity’ — reflecting on conversations with Doc Searls and Drummond Reed

Mon, 08 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

First published to the generative identity website .

No two people can share an exact understanding of anything deep and meaningful simply because we each have different contexts. Conversation relies upon and can never wholly substitute for context. Nevertheless, we can work to grow a shared understanding through conversation, and the relationship between conversationalists evolves in the process.

The relationship is immanent in such informational exchange[1].

On one level, the opening paragraph here pertains to this being a blog post about conversations I’ve valued in recent months. But there’s another level given that ‘digital identity’ is our subject. Identity, in what you might call the natural and non-bureaucratic sense, is reciprocally defining and co-constitutive with relationships and information exchange[2].

Identities are immanent in the relationships immanent in information exchange.

Community moderating — bringing our best

Wed, 10 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Originally published to the Ethereum World blog .

In light of the Trump ban, far right hate speech, and the plainly weird QAnon conspiracy theories, the world’s attention is increasingly focused on the moderation of and by social media platforms.

Our work at AKASHA is founded on the belief that humans are not problems waiting to be solved, but potential waiting to unfold. We are dedicated to that unfolding, and so then to enabling, nurturing, exploring, learning, discussing, self-organizing, creating, and regenerating. And this post explores our thinking and doing when it comes to moderating.

Moderating processes are fascinating and essential. They must encourage and accommodate the complexity of community, and their design can contribute to phenomenal success or dismal failure. And regardless, we’re never going to go straight from zero to hero here. We need to work this up together.

We’re going to start by defining some common terms and dispelling some common myths. Then we explore some key design considerations and sketch out the feedback mechanisms involved, before presenting the moderating goals as we see them right now. Any and all comments and feedback are most welcome.

How the separation and unseparation of concerns contribute to SSI’s dystopian promise

Thu, 21 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Originally published by Omidyar Network’s Good ID .

As Einstein intimated [1], everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. Current architectures for digital identity — intended to meet some definition of the needs of the complex living system that is human society — are dangerously too simple for the task.

Even self-sovereign identity (SSI), not infrequently held up by its champions as having the requisite complexity by design or claims to that effect, encodes distressing emergent outcomes.

The deficiency of the "Generative Self-Sovereign Internet"

Wed, 13 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

First published to the generative identity website .

Phil Windley claims that a technology stack consisting of self-sovereign identity (SSI) and related technologies has all the qualities of generativity. He does so in his latest blog post with reference to Jonathan Zittrain ’s 2006 paper The Generative Internet . It’s a well-known and well-respected reference I offered among others in 2019 on using the adjective generative in the context of identity.

Zittrain qualifies technological generativity as a function of its “capacity for leverage across a range of tasks, adaptability to a range of different tasks, ease of mastery, and accessibility.”

Phil recommends the paper in support of his argument.

I recommend the paper to counter Phil’s broader argument and to underline the purpose and value of generative identity .

Control, agency and complexity — Phil Windley and Philip Sheldrake in conversation

Tue, 05 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I discussed the topics of sovereignty, agency and complexity on Medium.com with Phil Windley in December 2020 in follow-up to my September 2019 post: Generative identity — beyond self-sovereignty (first published to the AKASHA Foundation blog here ). Medium.com isn’t a great interface for following such threads, so the conversation was drawn together first on the generative identity website , and now reproduced below.

But we've spent fifteen years working on this

Tue, 10 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The critique of self-sovereign identity (SSI) has elicited this kind of response a few times now, a reaction pointing at if not acclaiming the huge effort that has gone into getting ‘digital identity’ this far. I’ve had it via the ProjectVRM Harvard mailing list, during the session on generative identity at the recent Internet Identity Workshop, and in private exchanges.

This cannot constitute a rational response to a critique but it is an understandable one, as many of my interlocutors recognize; there is a lot of emotional energy invested in such deep and long-term work. Open collaborators such as Doc Searls, Joyce Searls, and Drummond Reed, and it seems to me Phil Windley, appreciate the journey for all its twists and turns, but others — perhaps on visualizing some imminent arrival at some desired destination — respond differently.

The dystopia of self-sovereign identity (SSI)

Mon, 02 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

SSI has distressing emergent outcomes — the antithesis of the hopes and plans of the SSI community and those attracted to SSI’s real-world application. We have to reflect and rethink.

Put starkly, many millions of people have been excluded, persecuted, and murdered with the assistance of prior identity architectures, and no other facet of information technology smashes into the human condition in quite the same way as ‘digital identity’. Therefore, if ever there’s a technological innovation for which ‘move fast and break things’ is not the best maxim, this is it. We need to move together with diligent respect for human dignity and living systems.

Developed under the auspices of the AKASHA Foundation , and first published to the Generative Identity website .

With thanks to those who commented on draft versions: Dil Green, Will Abramson, Ryan Worsley, Jakub Lanc, Brent Zundel, Andrei Sambra, Mihai Alisie. And to those who have influenced the ideas here in conversation and in their writing: Matthew Schutte, Jonathan Donner, Elizabeth Renieris, Kieron O’Hara, Martin Etzrodt, Michael Shea.

The Number 1 Challenge for Humanity – Cooperating at Scale (part 2 of 2)

Mon, 10 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

First published to the AKASHA Foundation blog .

In the first of this two-part blog post I described why cooperating-at-scale is humanity’s primary challenge. Here I outline some candidate concepts and pre-architectural principles to inform the necessary and sufficient ‘sociotechnological primitives’.

First I’d like to qualify pre-architectural. It’s not oxymoronic despite arche meaning origin or beginning. Both physical and software architecture originate structure and structural relationships, and we’re not yet at the stage to prescribe such things. Structure is ossified pattern and our purpose at this early stage demands instead that we offer just a little structure to open up the space to explore and nurture multiple patterns in preparation for the emergence of multiple structural forms. If pre-architectural doesn’t do it for you, then perhaps think of it as a parsimony of design.

A means to our purpose is the encouragement of multi-disciplinary cooperation towards ever-improving multi-disciplinary cooperation. At scale.

Nuclear physicists refer to the smallest amount of fissile material needed for a sustained nuclear chain reaction as the critical mass. No-one can know the variety or volume or patterns or structures of the methods, materials and mindsets required to constitute a critical mass for cooperation-at-scale, but perhaps your spidey senses are similar to our own … maybe, just maybe, assembling such critical mass is a possibility nearer, rather than further away.

The Number 1 Challenge for Humanity - Cooperating at Scale (part 1 of 2)

Sat, 25 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

First published to the AKASHA Foundation blog .

Despite the over-emphasis of competition in Darwin’s theory of evolution, the great man himself sensed the importance of cooperation.

I should premise that I use the term Struggle for Existence in a large and metaphorical sense, including dependence of one being on another …

[On the Origin of Species, Darwin, 1859]

Modern day scientists know that any investment of resources by individuals — of the same species or different — in acts of cooperation could in fact make those individuals vulnerable to non-cooperators, and yet cooperating proves to be a continuing strength rather than a weakness. We see cooperation everywhere we look.

[We have] a new view of continual cooperation, strong interaction, and mutual dependence among life forms. Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking.

[Microcosmos , Margulis & Sagan, 1997]

Cooperation confers an irrefutable advantage and we’re still grappling with understanding the qualities of the mechanisms that make this the case.

Human beings are brilliant same-species cooperators — hence our parasitic success — and yet a quick scan of typical news headlines would suggest quite the opposite. Without dwelling too deeply on international relations or indeed media theory, the reported character of interactions between the likes of the United States and China and Russia and India and Europe might be said to be more fractious than cooperative. And national news headlines compound the gloom.

Why?

Why can’t we just work together for mutual advantage on our little blue marble ? As co-pilots of Spaceship Earth ?

A call for interdisciplinarity — generative identity and the Internet Identity Workshop

Mon, 30 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

First published to the AKASHA Foundation blog .

The post Generative identity — beyond self-sovereignty (2nd September) has spawned a lot of conversation in private channels and on the ProjectVRM Harvard mailing list … some 15,000 words in exchanges with more than a dozen people active in ‘digital identity’. This post is dedicated to the most salient parts by way of making a contribution from a distance to the 29th Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) taking place this week at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. Living eight time zones away, I have not yet had the opportunity to attend an IIW, and this occasion is no exception unfortunately.

This is a call to action. Whether it succeeds or not in that respect will depend in good part on how well I’ve been able to communicate the severity of the problem with the current trajectory — in terms of our psychological, societal, and ecological health — and how well I’ve been able to make the ethical case for the urgency of interdisciplinarity. Beyond that, it is in the hands of those leading the ‘identity community’.

Presenting generative identity at Edinburgh Napier University

Sat, 28 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Professor Bill Buchanan OBE invited me to present generative identity at the 2nd International Conference on Blockchain, Identity and Cryptography at Edinburgh Napier University earlier this month. Thanks Professor, and thanks too to Will Abramson for making me feel so welcome.

On the basis that the video of me walking around in front of my slides isn’t all that visually exciting(!), here’s a cut my colleague Joshua Long was good enough to produce, showing just the slides with the audio.

Generative identity — beyond self-sovereignty

Mon, 02 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

First published to the AKASHA Foundation blog .

With thanks to those who commented on draft versions: Matthew Schutte, Jonathan Donner, Martin Etzrodt, Andrei Sambra, Mihai Alisie.

Hero image generated from the original image by Ryan Alexander .

I’m going to outline three ways to think about digital identity to help move the conversation forward in line with the AKASHA Foundation’s purpose . I’m not claiming any neat taxonomy per se, just exploring very different degrees of nuance with radically distinct implications.

Relating to how personal and group identity is manifest online, naively
Relating to how personal and group identity is manifest online, expertly
Relating to how we might employ digital technologies to transform society’s accommodations of and approaches to identity, generatively.

Naively

It seems from observation alone that quite a few technologists work in this mode, excited to be bringing pre-digital bureaucratized identity into the digital age.

Verifying identity as a social intersection

Thu, 23 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

First published to the AKASHA Foundation blog .

Co-author of Radical Markets Glen Weyl invited me to review Verifying Identity as a Social Intersection , co-authored with his colleague at Microsoft, Dr. Nicole Immorlica , and Stanford University’s Professor Matthew Jackson .

The topic is so-called digital identity, a term that could be mistaken for how personal and group identity is manifest online, but actually relates to how we might employ digital technologies to transform society’s accommodations of and approaches to identity.

It is not a challenge that anyone might describe as readily “solvable”, as my recent webinar for SSImeetup makes plain. If anything, it is a fine exemplar for H.L. Mencken’s witticism:

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

This paper is an important contribution towards navigating this complexity appropriately. I do however identify a major problem — and therefore opportunity — relating to the conceptualizations of identity the authors have made their object. It appears they are intent on engineering for the trickiest yet perhaps the most societally important conceptualization, but then present it as a solution to a more mundane conceptualization, and one that desperately needs the balance of the former to mitigate its innate harmful potential.

I finish with a brief explanation of the AKASHA Foundation’s work here. As you can imagine, this is core to our purpose .

Good identity lives in between

Wed, 22 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Written for Omidyar Network’s Good ID project and first published to the project’s blog .

I love the way Derek Parfit introduces his book Reasons and Persons :

“We are particular people. I have my life to live, you have yours. What do these facts involve? What makes me the same person throughout my life, and a different person from you? And what is the importance of these facts? What is the importance of the unity of each life, and of the distinction between different lives, and different persons?”

The more you study it, the more you realize that identity is a tricky concept to grasp. There are many different ideas to describe what it is and what it does, but Parfit’s emphasis of its innate social nature appeals to me. After all, what good can identity serve should you find yourself all alone on that fabled desert island, apart from different persons?

My identities form with others, as theirs are formed with others and with me. It’s a product of relationships.

And those relationships? They’re established and defined through interactions.

Webinar on identity, interpersonal data and collective minds for SSI Meetup

Fri, 05 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I was delighted to accept an invitation from Alex Preukschat to host a webinar earlier this week on the topic of digital identity for SSImeetup.org . My presentation is based on the reciprocally-defining, inseparable conceptions of identity, relationships, and personal data — or interpersonal data as I like to call it after my AKASHA colleague Mihai Alisie unjumbled my previous garbled attempts to make a distinction.

The interpersonal data at the heart of all human digital systems, including markets

Mon, 11 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

In light of the Radical Markets book chapter entitled Data as Labor , its co-author Glen Weyl invited me to write this post for the RadicalxChange blog, published 9 Feb 2019 .

The RadicalxChange mission dedicates the community to “using dramatically expanded competitive, free and open market mechanisms to reduce inequality, build widely-shared prosperity, heal global political divides and build a richer and more cooperative social life.”

Our values are aligned and our purpose very similar, but I will describe here some important considerations in designing for personal data that may not yet have received attention by the RadicalXChange community.

Co-operating is essential

It is, I think, critical to outline the emphasis I adopt here in framing the problem and the opportunity. Whereas the RadicalxChange mission aims to have competition lead to greater co-operation, I treat competition and co-operation here as equal and concurrent. Here are two quotes by way of explanation.

The brilliant and indomitable biologist Lynn Margulis discovered that:

The view of evolution as a chronic bloody competition among individuals and species, a popular distortion of Darwin’s notion of “survival of the fittest,” dissolves before a new view of continual cooperation, strong interaction, and mutual dependence among life forms. Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking.

And the progenitor of the invisible hand himself, Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations, actually considered his Theory of Moral Sentiments to be the superior work. It is, as Gintis et al write , the perfect counterbalance.

Effective policies are those that support socially valued outcomes not only by harnessing selfish motives [Wealth of Nations / competition] to socially valued ends, but also by evoking, cultivating, and empowering public-spirited motives [Theory of Moral Sentiments / co-operation].

I had such a blend in mind a few years ago when I had a stab at defining the meaning of business beyond the outworn credo of shareholder value and the Newtonian simplicity of customer-centricity; that is, to establish and drive mutual value creation. Competitive and co-operative.

The misleading name, metaphor defiance, and awesome potential of "personal data" — part 3 of 3

Wed, 23 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

In the first post of this series I asserted that data is data. In other words, it’s not like anything else. The second post explored and dismissed conceptualisations of data-as-property and data-as-labour. This, the last post in this series, explores data-as-reputation, data-as-public-good, and data-as-me, and then points to some architectural principles for a new direction — interpersonal data.

The problem of the way we frame the opportunity and problem

Data-as-reputation

Rachel Botsman discusses reputation scoring in her book What’s Mine Is Yours (check your library ), and summarises the opportunity in a later magazine article:

Imagine a world where banks take into account your online reputation alongside traditional credit ratings to determine your loan; where headhunters hire you based on the expertise you’ve demonstrated on online forums such as Quora; where your status from renting a house through Airbnb helps you become a trusted car renter on WhipCar; where your feedback on eBay can be used to get a head-start selling on Etsy; where traditional business cards are replaced by profiles of your digital trustworthiness, updated in real-time. Where reputation data becomes the window into how we behave, what motivates us, how our peers view us and ultimately whether we can or can’t be trusted.

Welcome to the reputation economy, where your online history becomes more powerful than your credit history.

… It’s the culmination of many layers of reputation you build in different places that genuinely reflect who you are as a person and figuring out exactly how that carries value in a variety of contexts.

The most basic level is verification of your true identity – is this person a real person? Are they who they say they are?

Rachel Botsman, Wired Magazine

There is nothing to dislike about the advantages touched upon here. Unfortunately, like most things in life, the upsides come with downsides.

The misleading name, metaphor defiance, and awesome potential of "personal data" — part 2 of 3

Mon, 21 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

In the preceding post I proposed that reframing personal data as interpersonal data is much more appropriate, more useful, more valuable. I also asserted that data is data — i.e. not like anything else. To support these points, this post explores and dismisses the dominant conceptualisation of personal data as property, and then reviews the less well-known data-as-labour framing.

The problem of the way we frame the opportunity and problem

Data-as-property

Let’s linger a while on markets and the fundamental components of money and property. I’m working on the supposition that cryptonetworking may be integral to a future interpersonal data architecture, and given that Bitcoin is the genesis of cryptonetworking, it’s doubly instructive to reflect on money.

Money is attributed value, but value is far deeper and broader than the mere monetary sense — in the money can’t buy you love sense for example. Nevertheless, our current civilization is monotheistic in its veneration of the market, and our first inclinations when grappling with any shiny new idea is to see if we can’t quantify its value and subject it to the manipulations of Adam Smith’s invisible hand. Despite quite substantial evidence to the contrary, our idolatry of this mechanism truly marks it out as a religion imho.

Sometimes free markets work best. Sometimes well-regulated markets work best. Sometimes, markets don’t work best.

The misleading name, metaphor defiance, and awesome potential of "personal data"

Thu, 17 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

We have a problem and an opportunity currently labelled “personal data”.

The opportunity encompasses nothing less than a complete redesign of our lives and societies and our collective ability to grapple with complex adaptive systems including super-wicked problems — but this will remain elusive until we’ve wrestled with the “personal data” problem, including the problem of the way we frame the opportunity and problem.

While we needed the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR ) to stop some very disrespectful and frankly unethical and harmful practices relating to personal data, no regulation can require innovation. The innovation, indeed transformation, I’m talking about here is in the spirit if not the letter of the regulation. Perhaps the most prominent and simplest explanation for why it cannot be to the letter is contained in the Regulation’s first definition (Article 4 ) by which “an identified or identifiable natural person” is thereafter known as a “data subject”, which is entirely the wrong framing for the kind of innovation I envisage.

This topic is core to my work and this post serves two purposes. First, selfishly, it’s a way to communicate efficiently without having to repeat the contents on a weekly basis. Second, I hope to identify more like and dislike minds in seeking the collective intelligence needed to explore the bountiful and indeed existentially critical opportunity sooner than later.

Why decentralization needs more than cryptonetworks – the Internetome

Tue, 20 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Aldous Huxley (1937) regarded the decentralization of industry and government necessary for a better society. Norbert Wiener’s insights (1950) into the dynamics and ethics of humans and large computer systems hinted at the advantages. Marshall McLuhan (1962) anticipated a shift from the centralized mechanical age to the decentralized electronic age, coining the term global village as shorthand for such a welcome outcome. E.F. Schumacher (1973) considered decentralization allied with freedom and one of “the truths revealed by nature’s living processes”. Steven Levy’s hacker ethic (1984) includes the tenet “mistrust authority – promote decentralization”. And Nicholas Negroponte (1995) regards decentralization as one of the four cardinal virtues of the information society (alongside globalization, harmonization and empowerment).

When centralization is mediated by an organization, governmental or corporate, its best interests must be aligned perfectly and continuously with the parties subject to its gravity in the mediating context – otherwise decentralization must be preferred to avoid the appropriation and erosion of those parties’ valuable agency. Importantly, decentralization demands decentralization at every level without exception for any exception would be centralization. By definition.

This post aims to scope the challenge that still lies ahead to secure decentralization even with the rise and rise of cryptonetworks such as Ethereum . For more information about decentralization in general and why it’s important, see Decentralization – a deep cause of causes you care about deeply , written for the World Wide Web Foundation.

The Digital Life Collective launches – a co-operative nurturing Tech We Trust

Mon, 16 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

The Digital Life Collective co-operative is officially launched today. Here’s some text I helped develop for the new website to situate why our mission is important …

Today, we cannot determine if technology is trustworthy else when it’s betraying our trust.

Trust is a vital aspect of every friendship, every family, every society. When you and another person trust each other, you’ve worked out that your interests are suitably aligned. You both believe the other will behave in ways that ‘look out’ for the two of you, that serve you both well.

Trust supports our interactions as social animals. We’ve evolved to look for clues that tell us how trustworthy another might be, and to explore ways to test and build that trust without really thinking about it. We end up with:

You trust someone else to do X.

What does trust mean in technological terms?

Value flows when data flows meaningfully through sociotechnical networks – in search of the ideal data architecture

Mon, 04 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Competitive advantage and profitable growth doesn’t come from scale anymore. The rate at which big players in any and all industries beach their supertanker is unprecedented.

Competitive advantage and profitable growth doesn’t come from efficiency anymore either. What’s the point of making unwanted product efficiently?

Competitive advantage and profitable growth comes from adaptability. Pure and simple. Adapt or die.

A 2011 article in the Harvard Business Review pronounced adaptability the new competitive advantage. It asks how your managers can pick up the right signals to understand and harness change when they’re overwhelmed with changing information. The conclusion – instead of being really good at doing some particular thing, companies must be really good at learning how to do new things.

As Peter Senge points out, organizations only learn through individuals who learn, perhaps aided by machine learning these days. And learning craves meaningful data.

Lack of data was the problem of the 20th Century, yet the opportunity and challenge of the 21st is having too much of the stuff. This is the landscape of digital transformation and, I believe, the very bedrock of the meaning of business: establishing and driving mutual value creation (PDF ).

Value flows when data flows meaningfully through sociotechnical networks, and I’ve been on a mission to find out how to make this happen.

the hi:project and the Digital Life Collective

Tue, 25 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This is the newsletter about the Digital Life Collective sent to hi:project subscribers 24th April 2017 and posted to the hi:project blog .

The hi:project team is collaborating with others interested in trustworthy and empowering technologies. We’re working to launch the Digital Life Collective and we’d love you to be part of it.

Now for anyone interested in the trials and tribulations of an ambitious, open-source, nonprofit vision such as the hi:project, I provide a fuller debrief below. For those who prefer their updates bitesize, everything you need is contained in the next six paragraphs.

…

You’ll recall the hi:project has some mighty challenges in its sights. We will help: solve personal data & privacy; secure a citizen-centric Internet of Things; transform accessibility & digital inclusion.

Just as for many free open source software projects, no-one profits with the hi:project but rather everyone because of it. And therein lies both the broad opportunity and the deep problem. If everyone secures the return on investment, if the profit cannot be privatised, who exactly is going to make the investment?

In other words, markets aren’t designed to address such particular potential, but that hasn’t stopped us appealing to commercial players – more on how that works below. Moreover, it doesn’t seem foundations can fund and foster such fundamental architecture. And our brush with academic funding was a brush off. In all, we’ve been working across four fronts, failing at these three, and seeing if we can succeed at the fourth.

At first the fourth appears counter-intuitive … if the hi:project seemed too big, fifty of us have banded together so far to go bigger. The Digital Life Collective is a co-operative dedicated to “tech we trust for the world we want”, and today is the day we go all official. Today we put the incorporation paperwork in the post and invite you to become a co-founding member so that together we can give the market a miss for the moment, pause the powwow with foundations, give up grinding the grant applications … and start simply co-operating.

Technology of, by and for the people. Our tech, not their tech. Find out more now at www.diglife.com .

As for engineering the hi:project … well we’ll be making our case to the Collective in due time.

The debrief

From the moment we started talking about the hi:project, we contrasted the user interface (UI) and the human interface (HI), the former describing the status quo in which you, the mere user, are actually the used, where you are in fact the product being sold, the civilian being controlled . By adopting HI as our terminology, we communicate the intent to reinstate your sovereignty, your dignity, your humanity.

The Digital Life Collective

Thu, 26 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

An invitation to build our technology together … tech we trust for the web we want.

Our motivation

Digital technologies are undermining our privacy, permitting mass state surveillance, enabling censorship, undermining journalism, and spreading fake news. It feels forbidding, uncertain, unsafe – more problem than solution, and far from the original vision for the Internet and Web.

And yet we’re optimistic that we can join together to fix it. The problem isn’t really the technologies we have to work with of course, but rather the way they’re crafted and who gets to do the crafting.

The unfreedom of filter bubbles – let's pop the bloody things

Fri, 02 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

We could see it coming. Sort of.

I wrote a post titled myChannel back in 2005, a time without smartphones, Facebook, Twitter and news aggregators like Flipboard. YouTube was 17 days off launching. Reviewing the tech landscape I concluded:

… mass personalisation has become a ‘qualifying’ rather than ‘winning’ criteria. The advantages to the user include choice (of the most apt personalisation), collation, and access in their own time and filtering. …The user, the recipient of news and information, the listener, the viewer, the inter-actor, has been empowered to set the schedule. It’s what they want, when they want it and how they want it. They have one channel … and they own it. It is myChannel.

How and why I strive to maintain my privacy – a post in light of the Snooper's Charter

Fri, 18 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

[caption id=“attachment_30414” align=“alignnone” width=“1024”] An aerial image of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire.
Photographer: GCHQ/Crown Copyright. CC BY-SA 2.0[/caption]

Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.

Edward Snowden, 2015 (source )

I get asked now and then how to improve one’s personal privacy, digitally speaking. It’s unsurprising that such questions are directed my way given privacy is a core objective of the hi:project , and yet I seemed to have attracted more than the usual number of questions since my last post – Introducing Google Assistant, the Surveillance Interface .

You might want to stop commercial entities intruding – it’s difficult to sum up in a sentence or two how egregious the state of commercial surveillance is today. You might want to help head off the realisation of a surveillance state if only because you’ve read somewhere that such things don’t end well. You might simply want to have less data about your movements and purchases and media habits and general proclivities out there because it’s not a case of if the corresponding databases are hacked but when.

Importantly, I write this post the very week the UK has passed the most extreme surveillance law ever passed in a democracy. The so-called Snoopers’ Charter is disgusting, distressing and, in good part, stupid.

Introducing Google Assistant, the Surveillance Interface (SI)

Mon, 31 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

A new kind of interface has surfaced over the past five years – artificial intelligence (AI) based ‘personal assistants ’.

Apple Siri started the ball rolling, swiftly followed by Google Now , Microsoft Cortana , Amazon Alexa , and half a dozen others. But it now has a new apogee, a new sector defining moment, a revolution dressed up as evolution. The only thing more alarming than its instrusive, opaque, and society-altering capabilities is the way in which tech pundits have ladled out the accolades, pundits whose worldview appears as limited as a magpie’s regard for shiny things.

Google Now is now Google Assistant , and it comes integrated into Google’s first full-on (i.e. not just a reference design) mobile phone – the Pixel.

The pot calling the kettle black – Teresa May 'subverting democracy'

Mon, 03 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Prime Minister Teresa May has presented the conclusion that many experts (yes, the very same derided by Brexiteer Michael Gove) worked out some time ago. There is no such thing as a ‘soft’ Brexit.

The very idea of a ‘soft’ Brexit may as well have been called ‘have-your-cake-and-eat-it’ Brexit, because very rarely if ever does one get such an opportunity, particularly when there are 27 others at the table.

Lightning – cryptocurrency and the Internet of Things

Wed, 10 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Bitcoin is an experiment. That’s granted. The fact that it’s trusted and actually useful is nothing short of phenomenal. Last week for example, the trade volume amounted to US$229m.

Nevertheless, Bitcoin has some fundamental constraints that keep it from going mainstream: it has a ballpark limit of 7 transactions per second, and having confidence that a transaction has ‘gone through’ – non-recourse transactions – takes roughly 20 to 60 minutes depending on the level of confidence you’re looking for. (The user experience sucks too, but that’s not for this post.)

While 229 million dollars is no small chunk of change, Visa processes many thousands of transactions per second, peaking at tens of thousands, and will have processed around US$130 billion last week.

State channel – more exciting than it sounds

The crypto awesome sauce underpinning Bitcoin is known as the blockchain, perhaps the No.1 tech buzzword of recent times. It’s at the heart of the currency’s success – preventing users spending the same money twice – but is also the nub of its relatively slothful nature. It’s with a fair degree of excitement then that I’ve been tracking the progress of Lightning, a protocol first mooted to my knowledge in 2013.

The jargon here is state channel – blockchain interactions that could occur on the blockchain but get conducted off-chain without impairing the trust parties have in the interaction. Lightning facilitates state channel to speed things up and attenuate the costs needed to prove transactions (and offers a little more spark in terms of brand appeal!)

The meaning of business

Sat, 30 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Why do firms exist? Strangely, no-one appears to have asked this question until a 27 year-old economist did so in 1937.

Ronald Coase published his answer in The Nature of the Firm, now considered a seminal text. He studied the circumstances that led entrepreneurs to hire people as employees instead of simply contracting jobs out to traders and came up with the answer we now simply refer to as transaction costs. People are hired when the various associated costs are lower than they would be otherwise.

A majority now or when it matters? #thefiftypointtwo

Mon, 04 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The quickest glance at my posts and tweets will tell you two things: (1) we just voted on a multi-faceted complex issue with too little understanding further muddied by the lies pedalled by both sides , and (2) I believe everyone in the UK is better off by our remaining in the European Union.

There’s a reason Margaret Thatcher concurred with Lord Attlee in describing referenda as “a device of dictators and demagogues” – the same reason the UK has representative parliamentary democracy and not direct democracy. (If only David Cameron had paid more attention in class.)

Former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg describes the resultant mess as a “debilitating cocktail of hubris, incompetence and dishonesty ”.

Yet putting the well-known shortcomings of direct democracy to one side for the moment, we must accept that just shy of 52% of voters went to the polling stations last month and put a cross against Leave. The majority has spoken, right?

Neither Leave nor Remain is perfect, of course, yet to my mind the Leave argument is akin to trashing your car because the ride is a bit bumpy, so I find myself asking … which majority should we be thinking about?

Doh! Can we have another think about this Brexit thing please?

Sat, 25 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

On June 23rd 2016, 51.9% of UK voters opted to leave the European Union. I’m writing here to say:

We made a mistake
We should have another think about it, and
The Liberal Democrats might hold the key and not realise it.

_________

UPDATE: Approximately eight hours after my post here, Liberal Democrats pledge to keep Britain in the EU after next election . This is great news. We now just need to persuade the party that they need to run at it on a single-issue basis. By doing so, pro-EU voters can cast a clear vote without other policies clouding the matter, and there can then be no ambiguity in interpreting the vote. This could make the difference between winning and not, and winning by a massive margin. As I write in conclusion to this post, I’m sure the electorate would then thank them in the follow-on election.

_________

Winston Churchill, considered one of the Founding Fathers of the EU , noted that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. It’s wonderful to live in a democracy, and I find it exciting and exasperating, fascinating and frustrating, to be part of the European union of democracies.

A democracy cannot be perfect. The people can make mistakes — of course— and I believe we just made one. A really really big one. Whereas we might change our minds every five years with general elections, leaving the EU is the sort of thing that impacts for generations.

The EU Referendum campaigns should learn from Aristotle

Thu, 16 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

An email sent to all my friends and family.

There’s no doubting Aristotle was a rare genius. Encyclopædia Britannica calls him the first genuine scientist. And it’s amazing that here I am in the 21st Century emailing you (and in fact just about everyone I know with an email address) about the insights of a man born exactly 2400 years ago.

(That’s equivalent to someone doing the same for you or me in the 44th Century CE, and I think we can agree on the likelihood of that!)

I read this article on Aristotelian rhetoric / persuasive powers in 2012 , and I was so enamoured that I wrote a short blog post on it at the time. In summary, Aristotle concluded that the three most powerful tools of persuasion are:

Ethos – argument by character
Logos – argument by logic
Pathos – appealing to the emotions.

Defining Sovereign Technology, so we can build it, and so we know it when we see it

Mon, 30 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Note: the IIW community adopted the qualifying prefix “self-” not too long after this post was first written, ie. self-sovereign technology.

Agency refers not to the intentions people have in doing things but to their capability of doing those things in the first place.

To be able to ‘act otherwise’ means being able to intervene in the world, or to refrain from such intervention, with the effect of influencing a specific process or state of affairs.

(Giddens 1986 )

Technology must always be a component of agency as tools change our capacity to ‘act otherwise’. And it’s a component that’s all the more pervading and penetrating as the delineation of the analogue and digital dissolves, as ‘the device’ assumes an exo-brain role and as sensory ‘things’ form our exo-nervous system.

Simultaneously, I have a digital self and a self with digital presence.

Simultaneously, this is me and it is my representative, my agent.

Simultaneously, it is core to my agency and must be subject to it.

Q&A with CIPR Influence magazine

Fri, 20 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I was interviewed by Rob Smith, Editor, Influence magazine . Published in two parts , May 2016.

What does Influence mean to the public relations business currently? Is it more important since the rise of digital or has it always been at the heart of what it is to be a public relations professional?

You have been influenced when you think in a way you wouldn’t otherwise have thought or do something you wouldn’t otherwise have done. Unfortunately, the English language also has us using the word ‘influence’ in terms of something someone might possess.

I always prefer to work with the first meaning here for two reasons: first, the changing of hearts, minds and deeds is the actual object of interest to public relations professionals (reciprocally of course, more on which later); second, we might quantify the former better than the latter, and indeed many of the better attempts to score influence as something someone might possess rely to a certain extent on that capacity being demonstrated (ie, the former again).

What does this mean to PR practice right now? Well that depends on your flavour of practice, characterised rather usefully at this juncture by Andy Green as simply old school and new school.

Workfront and the future of work

Wed, 04 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

http://www.slideshare.net/Sheldrake/workfront-leap-may-2016

I’m in Orlando Florida this week with the Workfront team and their partners and customers for their annual Leap conference. It’s my privilege to participate in a panel session on the future of work, and to deliver a session with the more grounded title – making work suck less!

As you can see from the stack here, the first too common affront I identify and tackle is what I generally call the ‘X steps to heaven’ crowd. Those authors and companies proffering clickbait that teases with some relatively short sequence of steps needed to take you from zero to hero – in this context, going from a dysfunctional to awesome organization.

Barking a top-down command to be bottom-up

Mon, 04 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

According to The Onion earlier this year:

Warning of severe consequences if he didn’t see results, Pantheon Digital Consulting COO Daniel Abelson, 59, told employees Monday he wants a relaxed, friendly company culture implemented by the end of the week …

Interesting approach.

Organisational culture is a notoriously tricky thing to pin down. My favoured definition is simply – how things get done round here. And if you’re tempted by new forms of organisation that retire command and control and emphasise self-organisation, how on Earth do you get that process started?

Can you use that command and control authority one last time to instruct people to dismantle command and control?

Why can't Deezer answer simple questions about privacy?

Wed, 06 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve just bought an Onkyo TX-8150 network receiver. Lovely. Especially because it can drive two pairs of speakers, eats so-called hi-res music (24/192 with a 32/384 Hi-Grade DAC), and comes ready to play nice with the likes of Spotify, Airplay and Deezer.

Spotify tarnished its reputation somewhat with its privacy cock-up last year, and doesn’t yet entertain hi-res. Apple’s Airplay looks neat but doesn’t do hi-res either, and totally ignores Android. Hmm. So let’s check out Deezer I thought to myself. A rare European Unicorn . And while it describes lossless CD quality as hi-res when that’s not really what the term means, I’m not sure my ’listening environment’ is that sensitive! Lossless CD quality will do me.

On the future of manufacturing

Tue, 24 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I was invited last week to talk about the future of manufacturing at an event run by the manufacturing practice of one of the big law firms. Here’s a whistle stop summary. It’s a mind-blowing vista.

Intro

On considering political, economic, social and technological factors, it’s unarguable that we’re contemplating major flux in manufacturing. As with any flux, today’s players will either win out or lose out, and clearly everyone in this room wishes to contribute to and participate in the winning side of things!

With that in mind, I’d like to explore some major themes:

Dehumanisation
Dematerialisation
Decentralisation
Deindustrialisation

That list sounds fairly destructive, yet I believe manufacturing is then transformed, manufacturing is vital, and manufacturing is more exciting than ever.

"A New Balanced Scorecard for Communications" – a critique

Mon, 23 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve just been pointed to a recent post by Tim Marklein on The Measurement Standard, A New Balanced Scorecard for Communications . I can’t endorse it as it stands, as I understand it, and this post explains why.

For a bit of background, this summary of the Balanced Scorecard and associated Strategy Maps is based on the one in my book, The Business of Influence , and is one of my post popular webpages attracting thousands of visitors every month ;-) Do check it out if the Scorecard is new to you.

Having been frustrated by the very narrow practice of public relations, by the plain wrong approaches to alignment and performance measurement, and by the seeming isolation of the PR function from the rest of the business at a time when its best qualities are more vital than ever, I sought in 2009 to crystallise my ideas to help organisations transition to a more relevant and mutually valuable model. Knowing that organisational change is hard, I focused on the dominant way some of the world’s largest and most successful businesses seek to articulate and guide performance – the Balanced Scorecard – in order to tap into the monster’s own strengths, jujitsu style .

I called the resultant framework the Influence Scorecard , and I was delighted that Robert Howie, then the Director of the Kaplan Norton Balanced Scorecard Hall of Fame for Executing Strategy, penned the foreword .

Recoding public relations

Tue, 27 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Having co-founded, built and sold a PR consultancy. Having written a book on reframing marketing and PR for the digital age that’s now recommended reading across a number of under- and post-graduate courses. Having made some of the first presentations to the PR profession on the implications of the Internet of Things, the Semantic Web, and machined media. And having co-founded the CIPR’s prolific social media group, I have it appears left the profession. And for some good time now.

I’ve taken the best the PR profession and academe have to offer the world, and then determinedly escaped its narrow practice. I’ve found I can now offer consultancy that isn’t framed by preconceived ideas of PR. I can combine it with management consultancy more broadly, with org design and social business, with digital transformation and web science, without anyone saying “that’s not PR!”

It does I admit help that I am a chartered engineer. Engineering is my nature. I will always be an engineer, but my association with PR is always framed these days in the past tense, if only to disassociate myself from inadequate and inappropriate context.

21st Century public relations isn’t a synonym for media relations, or earned media, or simply “communications” come to that. It isn’t publicity or, worse, spin. It isn’t a side function and it’s definitely ill-suited as a marketing function.

A haiku for the prospects of the sociotechnical

Wed, 14 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday, at Southampton University, my WAIS colleague Ian Brown challenged me to write a haiku to describe my research interests. Here’s my effort, the first time in a decade of blogging that I’ve posted poetry … and quite possibly the last time too!

we in our biome add data and shake open an Internetome

Google on collaboration – a new study

Wed, 16 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

First published to Gigaom Research .

Our customers often tell us that encouraging and enabling collaboration has dramatically improved their business. We decided to dig a little deeper by conducting some original cross-industry research that measures the power of workplace collaboration in concrete terms.

This is how Google introduces the findings of its recent survey of senior staff and C-suite executives at 258 North American companies across a wide range of business sectors and sizes. (PDF of full report .) The primary conclusion is presented up front:

… collaboration has a significant impact on business innovation, performance, culture and even the bottom line.

This is quite right and quite wrong. Collaboration is at once driven and the driver; it is both a cause and an effect. As is culture come to that. Effectively, Google must grapple with two distinct appreciations of business among its customers and prospects.

Simply complex

If there’s one thing that differentiates organization this century from the last it’s that we may now acknowledge complexity and do something about it. We increasingly have the technologies to help navigate complexity. Choosing to do so offers competitive advantage for the time being; there will soon come a time when failing to do so renders an organization unresponsive, fragile and, consequently, bust. (Note that complexity and complication are different things.)

Work IT: bring-you-and-your-own-everything

Fri, 07 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

First published to Gigaom Research .

Cast your mind back a decade or more. Did you request specific hardware from your company’s IT team? If so, you started a trend that continues to play out to this day, and will continue to its logical and exciting conclusion.

You may or may not have been successful in your request given IT’s historic intransigence, but nowadays many of us expect to rock up to work with the laptop and tablet and smartphone of our choosing – often our own – and expect the IT team’s full accommodation.

We’re also bringing our own applications. Non-IT staff have adopted software-as-a-service without necessarily going through their IT colleagues. Yammer, Trello and Slack for example. Perhaps Google Docs crept in without organization-wide adoption of Google for Work. Meeting schedulers. Note-takers. Expense trackers. Skype. Dropbox. Instagram. The list is as long as the kind of things you need to get done.

It’s useful to think of this in terms of Enterprise IT and Work IT. The enterprise owns Enterprise IT whereas the worker owns Work IT. In simple terms, Enterprise IT is focused on the organization, Work IT on organizing. Enterprise IT is top-down with the starting position of locking everything down, whereas Work IT is bottom-up, thriving by facilitating sharing and openness.

Toward a social compact for digital privacy and security

Mon, 08 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Updated 16th September, embedding the videos of the session below.

The Global Commission on Internet Governance (ourinternet.org) was established in January 2014 to articulate and advance a strategic vision for the future of Internet governance. With work commencing in May 2014, the two-year project is conducting and supporting independent research on Internet-related dimensions of global public policy, culminating in an official commission report.

Marketing and PR and the General Data Protection Regulation

Fri, 22 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

My main character in Attenzi – a social business story , the CEO Eli Appel, has this to say over lunch with his chairman:

Good business is about cooperative and interdependent relationships, always has been, yet the humanity was lost when organizations scaled way up during the 20th Century. We want to make those relationships more human again, but the answer can’t be to scale it all back down. We have to scale something else up.

He adds:

… No business can really get to be social in a meaningful and valuable way simply by indulging in social media or by slapping apps onto social devices or by subscribing to a social enterprise network.

Eli is referring here to the visceral difference between ‘doing’ social (bolted on) and ‘being’ social (built in), and you know which one you’re on the receiving end of in any given situation right?

Talking garbage and the purpose of business

Fri, 15 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The third in a series on the topic of the purpose of business. Follows:

Business exists to establish and drive mutual value creation. Steve Denning challenged this statement, preferring Drucker’s assertion that the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer. I responded, and he has challenged my response:

we may be talking about different things: theoretical purpose of a firm and how to run it

“satisfying all the stakeholders” isn’t a viable heuristic to run a firm. See Making Management as Simple as Frisbee

“satisfying all the stakeholders” was tried in mid20thC. It led to Garbage Can firms.

[tweet tweet tweet ]

Garbage

Steve refers to “garbage can firms” in his Forbes article, Is The Tyranny Of Shareholder Value Finally Ending? , an eloquent take down of prioritizing the pursuit of shareholder value. When it comes to garbage it quotes a trio of academics – Cohen, March and Olsen – who in 1972 explained:

Debating the purpose of business

Thu, 07 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The second in a series on the topic of the purpose of business:

Steve Denning published an article to the Drucker Forum last week, How The Internet Is Forcing The Humanization Of Work , an argument founded on Drucker’s assertion that the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.

Steve found my post on the purpose of business post-Drucker via a thread with Kenneth Mikkelsen and tweeted his comments. His first quotes my re-definition of the purpose of business:

[The] Problem with “establish and drive mutual value creation” is that it doesn’t tell me what anyone has to do.

and then :

“Delight customers” as the goal is crystal clear as to what everyone has to do.

and lastly :

Since power has shifted from seller to buyer, “delighting customers” sets priorities right, for firm to survive

I share Steve’s optimism that we may be on the cusp of the potential to possibly humanize work (can my optimism be more tentative?!), but I cannot subscribe to his rationale.

What, exactly, is the purpose of business? An answer post-Drucker

Fri, 17 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The first post in what turned out to be a series of three on the topic of the purpose of business:

Peter Drucker asserted that the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer. He was right at the time in offering previously inward-looking firms a more appropriate beacon. His dictum is, however, wrong for our time.

The assertion is insufficient in sustainability terms; ie, being concerned with the health and resilience of living systems such as organizations, society and the environment. A customer-centric outlook is too simplistic, simply failing to recognise complexity, and therefore at threat from business that has progressed beyond Drucker’s heuristic.

Different kinds of privacy, empowerment and autonomy – centralized versus decentralized

Thu, 09 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

[Originally posted to the hi:project blog .]

In an article in the Guardian last week , Professor Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland mooted the potential for Google to cleave in two, with one part dedicated to providing a regulated bank-like service for data. Pentland directs the MIT Human Dynamics Lab and co-leads both the Big Data and the Personal Data and Privacy initiatives of the World Economic Forum, and I’m surprised how often his name crops up in my hi:project related research, yet I find it difficult to reconcile his observation here with his fluency in the power of decentralized networks :

Social physics strongly suggest that the [Adam Smith’s] invisible hand is more due to trust, cooperation and robustness properties of the person-to-person network of exchanges than it is due to any magic in the workings of the market. If we want to have a fair, stable society, we need to look to the network of exchanges between people, and not to market competition.

Pentland continues under the heading: How can we move from a market-centric to a human-centric society?

Technology trends relevant to change management

Tue, 03 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I have been invited to talk about tech trends relevant to change management at this evening’s London meeting of the Change Management Institute .

I’m keeping most excellent company alongside Karolina Lewandowska , Change and Transformation Manager at Google UK, and Faith Forster , Founder and CEO Pinipa .

The image here is taken from an excellent blog post by Lee Bryant of PostShift – The Quantified Organisation: can change become routine?

The quantified self, the quantified organization, and the organized self

Fri, 27 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The diagram here portrays where I’m going with this post, so let’s dive in.

The quantified self

The current Wikipedia entry for quantified self (QS) describes it as “a movement to incorporate technology into data acquisition on aspects of a person’s daily life in terms of inputs (e.g. food consumed, quality of surrounding air), states (e.g. mood, arousal, blood oxygen levels), and performance (mental and physical).”

And it doesn’t stop at mere data acquisition of course; as the strapline for a major QS community puts it, we’re looking at self knowledge through numbers. Adriana Lukas, founder and organiser at London Quantified Self Group , proselytizes self-managed QS, a future in which “expertise is supplied rather than outsourced”, where each of us acquires “agency as sense-maker”.

That’s certainly a powerful and possibly quite natural vision, and one I wholeheartedly embrace. Yet it’s also counter to the branded data siloes many a purveyor of QS gadgetry would, it seems, have one locked into. Adriana employs a turn of phrase, which may well be riffing off Doc Searls :

We can’t treat individuals as data cows to be milked for the data bucket.

The quantified organization

Lee Bryant, founder of PostShift, describes their take on ‘quantified organization’ :

… a framework of organisational health measures, informed by theory and company goals, that can guide ongoing change in an agile, iterative way and assess the success or failure of change actions against a desired future operating state.

Why I've decided to stop curating a Flipboard magazine

Wed, 18 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I have curated a Flipboard magazine for 16 months with the super title: Social Business Design magazine – Purpose & policy, openness & agility, structure & culture, communication & trust. Organizing to create more value for all faster than otherwise.

Trips off the tongue.

The service dutifully informs me that of all the stuff I read I have considered 913 articles worthy of inclusion in my niche ‘publication’, attracting 73 followers and 670 viewers.

The hi:project, social business and Flat Army

Tue, 27 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I help organisations work better, so how on Earth is that connected to the hi:project ? Given I dedicate not a small fraction of my time to this non-profit endeavour, I’m asked on occasion to explain how the two are related.

The ‘HI’ of the hi:project stands for human interface. It’s our way of describing the technology we think should and will largely supplant the user interface, the UI. Here’s how I’ve begun to explain it of late …

When we approach digital, we have a natural propensity to digitize the pre-digital; after all, that is all we know. That’s how we ended up sticking an ’e’ in front of mail for example, and went from having desktops, files and folders to, well, desktops, files and folders.

Yet digital has unprecedented qualities – it just takes us a while to discover and exploit them. It’s only with the passing of decades for example that organisations can now explore alternatives to email. And filing stuff looks increasingly anachronistic with the power of near-instant search at our fingertips.

In the same way, the UI is attached to the digital machine / service today because pre-digital physical machines had a physical interface.

An open letter to Paul Polman, Unilever – from Enterprise 2.0 Summit, London

Wed, 26 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I’m at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit at the British Academy in London today, courtesy of Kongress Media and Agile Elephant . In conversation with Lee Bryant , Matt Partovi , David Terrar , Damian Corbet , Céline Schillinger , Johan Lange , Janet Parkinson and Anne McCrossan , a common theme is emerging – we need such events as this, and the deep and wide potential of Enterprise 2.0, to extend beyond the inevitable echo chamber of today’s eager community.

McVeillance, coveillance, and socioveillance in the context of social business

Tue, 21 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I was a victim of McVeillance in June this year. I was walking around a shopping mall under systematic surveillance – CCTV everywhere – when I was accosted by security upon taking out my own camera to photograph the mall. (FYI, the mall itself was the subject of my photography and not its customers per se.)

Professor Steve Mann coined the expression McVeillance after he was manhandled out of a McDonalds in Paris where he was eating with his family in 2012 for no other reason than for wearing a computer vision system. McDonalds was watching him. He was watching McDonalds. And ’they’ didn’t like it.

I wasn’t ejected from the mall as I was actually undertaking a project for the mall’s owners, unbeknownst to the security personnel. I was escorted to the security office for appropriate clearance – an act which, per Mann’s definitions, officially made me a surveiller.

The word surveillance originates from French, from sur- ‘over’ + veiller ‘watch’ (from Latin vigilare ‘keep watch’). It invokes an authoritative orientation where one in authority, metaphorically if not physically above, watches those below. Mann had previously coined the word sousveillance . The French for ‘below’ is sous, hence the neologism for watching the watchers.

Influence measurement – a contribution to AMEC Measurement Week 2014

Fri, 12 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

In my last post on the topic of AMEC and measurement , I noted:

AMEC is the Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication, not “of Media”

I have taken that as the theme for my contribution to AMEC Measurement Week 2014, which kicks off Monday. Dr. Jon White is another influence who, in a recent exchange, pointed out that the problems of measurement in public relations are largely the result of the approach taken to management in public relations work.

Introducing the hi:project

Wed, 10 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The hi:project launches today. It’s a synthesis of many of the things I care about, from the original decentralizing visions for the Internet and Web, the aspiration that digital technologies can help people relate to each other better and understand each other better, and the idea that we might connect to each other without wondering who’s monitoring our every action.

I believe that making all variety of organization more agile, more valuable, more useful starts by empowering all the individuals that play a role in the organization’s success. The creation of mutual value begins with acquiring self-knowledge and mutual understanding to effect mutual influence, and this is exemplified by the question that concludes Attenzi - a social business story :

How is PR changing and who's going to do it?

Wed, 13 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve had a number of questions thrown at me by students in their dissertation deliberations these past weeks. I’m not going to post them all here as there is overlap as you can imagine, but this one complements nicely the Q&A with Phillip Casey (and here ) at Newcastle University.

[caption id=“attachment_29777” align=“alignright” width=“150”] Silvana Paules[/caption]

Silvana Paules is a post-graduate student undertaking a Masters in Strategic Management of Public Relations at the Higher School of Social Communication , Instituto Politécnico de Lisboa . (I took the main photo here on a trip to the Instituto Politécnico in 2011.)

Here are the answers I offered to some of her questions, and I start with a relevant extract from Chapter 10 of The Business of Influence .

The Chief Influence Officer (CInflO)

The incumbent [of this role] is charged with making the art and science of influencing and being influenced a core organizational discipline – charged with executing the Influence Scorecard . They will be keen to network with peers in other organizations, to share best practice, to identify, refine and codify proven techniques, and to flag up unseen or unanticipated flaws in the processes described in this book [and others].

In my opinion, the role of Chief Influence Officer will be regarded as being on a par with the COO, as CEO-in-waiting.

Ideally, the Chief Influence Officer will have a varied background covering marketing, PR, customer service, HR, product development and operations – just the kind of trajectory frequently mapped out for ‘future leader’ types. They will probably have more experience in one or more of these over others of course, but will set out as a matter of urgency to orient themselves in the areas of the organization with which they have least experience, working hard to establish a thorough and lasting rapport with functional heads and all stakeholder groups. They will excel at interpersonal communication, inspire confidence and a can-do attitude, and know instinctively when to crack resistance one-on-one and when to draft in support from the CEO.

Given the not inconsiderable change management, collaboration and coordination challenges, boards will look in-house for candidates with extant strong organization-wide interpersonal relationships and a reputation for making change happen from both the hard and the soft side of things. Appropriate candidates will recognize that the task is not achievable alone, particularly without unanimous and unequivocal board support – which they will be intent on working hard to secure, if not already manifest by his or her appointment.

The candidates will be highly numerate, probably having taken a statistics or research methodologies component to their university degree.

They will be ‘digitally native’. They will be curious and indefatigable by nature, and able to identify and exploit opportunities as rapidly as they identify and learn from failure.

They will be comfortable living simultaneously in both the extreme, unrelenting real-time, and the future two to four quarters hence.

[…] They will particularly relish the harsh, unflattering light thrown on previously opaque and unconnected aspects of the organization, and the boardroom accountability this allows them to enjoy and demands they live up to.

"We called it influencing the influencers." Adobe. Late-80s.

Tue, 05 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

You have been influenced when you think something you wouldn’t otherwise have thought, or do something you wouldn’t otherwise have done.

In the 20th Century, the marketing department did marketing, the PR people did PR, and no job title included the word influence. To this day, no role or team or department in the typical organization incorporates the word, which is why I pivot my client workshops around the topic of influencing and being influenced – not only does it address the actual thing we’re all interested in, it helps lower ego defence and removes functional blinkers.

Learning to measure and measuring to learn

Thu, 31 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The CIPR is in the process of updating its research, measurement and evaluation guidelines (PDF) . The current edition is dated March 2011 and harks back to when I used to chair the CIPR’s measurement deliberations; the current initiative is being led by Matt McKay and Martin Turner .

Here’s a short but important extract from the current guidance:

Every organisation should have a mission (why we exist), values (guiding behaviour), a vision (what do we want to be), objectives (breaking down the vision) and strategy (how we intend to get there / achieve the objectives). Given that measurement isn’t just the detached collection, analysis and presentation of data but a powerful management tool in itself, a powerful way to align each employee’s day-to-day activities with the strategy, this cascade must continue robustly, transparently and visibly.

People perform as they are measured, so the measures must drive strategically important behaviour.

And as each marketplace is unique and as your organisation is unique, your strategy will be unique. And so, therefore, will be the suite of measures you design, deploy and manage by.

Brand, PR, non-profits, and responsiveness – Q&A by Phillip Casey

Fri, 25 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Having put my two penn’orth out there over the years I’m occasionally approached by students at this dissertation time of year. This week, Phillip Casey and I struck up conversation on Twitter. Phillip is a post-graduate student undertaking the MA in Media and Public Relations at Newcastle University (pictured) and his dissertation is titled Brand Image: PR in the UK non-profit healthcare sector.

[caption id=“attachment_29730” align=“alignright” width=“150”] Phillip Casey[/caption]

I enjoyed responding to Phillip’s questions, so, with his permission, I thought I’d make our Q&A public here. (It migrated to email in case you were wondering about a 140 character count.)

Where a reference consists of just a page number, it refers to The Business of Influence: Reframing Marketing and PR for the Digital Age .

1) Is a strong brand image important for a non-profit organisation? Why?

A brand used to convey ownership of livestock. Then it was an “our name’s on it” quality assurance. This century, with product quality (defined as fitness-for-purpose) increasingly a given, a brand represents a nexus of values. If our values align with a brand, then I’m part of that brand. If they don’t, I look to take my time, attention and money elsewhere. [Attenzi ]

Organisations need to communicate their purpose and values in order to attract and assemble the right mix of people and resources to live up to its mission and pursue its vision. So brand, defined like this, lies at the heart of things.

The blockchain is coming your way

Mon, 21 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Bitcoin is the most famous cryptocurrency with the highest capitalization. As you can see from this screenshot from the “block reader” blockr , the capitalization at the time of writing is over eight billion dollars. According to citations of an IMF report on Wikipedia, that places it just above Moldova ’s GDP.

This post isn’t about bitcoin but the cryptographic foundation of Bitcoin. (The community prefers to capitalize the word when referring to the system, and lower case when referring to the currency.) This post doesn’t explain Bitcoin or the blockchain in detail – I recommend this series of presentations courtesy of the Khan Academy for those who want to learn more – but rather it’s about the technology’s wider application and its emergence and growth beyond the early adopters.

Get this into your block

So why am I interested in Bitcoin specifically, and its blockchain foundation more broadly? What does this have to do with social business ?

We are contemplating blockchain platforms to enable decentralized consensus in the not too distant future, allowing us to codify, decentralize, secure and trade many things that historically have demanded some centralized facility. This is akin to the bitcoin currency functioning without the need for a central bank, and the vista includes voting, domain names, financial exchanges, crowd funding, organizational governance, intellectual property, contracts and agreements of most kinds. The landscape even extends to so-called smart property with appropriate hardware integration.

Sometimes I wish I was more of a wordsmith, but this word will have to suffice – wowzers!

Deliberate and emergent, by design

Wed, 16 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been trying to reconcile the apparent tensions between the deliberate and emergent strategy schools of thought. After all, it’s a fundamental question at the heart of organizational life today.

Defining deliberate and emergent strategy

The deliberate strategy process is the one with which most people are most familiar if only because it dominated 20th Century organizational life and still does. A senior team reviews the market, the trends, the SWOT, the fruits of R&D, etc., and formulates strategy – where to play and how to win – that the wider organization is then charged with executing. And based on nothing more than atavistic agricultural habits that are now largely irrelevant, we exhibit a predilection for going through this process with a calendar based drumbeat.

Emergent strategy adherents on the other hand insist that such practice is pure fancy. It’s divination beyond the realm of even the most cogent, gifted and able senior leadership team. The deliberate strategy process supports C-title egos and little else. Rather, we’re better off making the organization sensitive to even the slightest changes, the weakest of signals, and developing an organizational fabric with the agility to react appropriately, to exploit opportunity and close down risk.

Taxi! Hailing a ride, but not too far into the future

Mon, 14 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The controversy Uber is causing right now prompted me to delve into the archives. Way back. Back to March 2000 when I was pitching a proposition called Peoplestaxi to the likes of 3i and Avis. It got selected for First Tuesday’s “Wireless Matchmaking” events too. Here’s a quick extract:

Peoplestaxi leverages the latest technologies and customer-centric e-business philosophy to deliver the ubiquitous, convenient and intelligent taxi management service for business and consumers.

Important – the Internet is changing to a new protocol

Fri, 11 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The Internet has transformed the world. Period. I think it’s important then to help everyone understand what it is exactly. I’m not talking degree-level understanding of computer networking, but a feel for the kind of thing going on ‘under the hood’.

This post explains the new numbering system for the Internet – fundamental for the continued health and prosperity of the Internet this century – and does so without the reader needing any prior technical understanding. There’s an executive summary if you only have two minutes. And then more detail if you fancy. It describes what your organization needs to be doing and why.

Most of the post is based on a document I wrote under the auspices of the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS ).

So let’s get stuck in. Firstly, allow me to differentiate between two terms too often and erroneously used interchangeably.

The Internet and the World Wide Web are different things

The Internet emerged in the concluding months of the 1960s. The World Wide Web on the other hand, like many other protocols, ‘runs’ on top of the Internet, and first twinkled in the eye of Sir Tim Berners-Lee in 1989.

Measuring communications and reconciling models, after Amsterdam

Wed, 18 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The AMEC International Summit on Measurement played out in Amsterdam last week, and I tuned in from afar. On 18th June 2013 I published my thoughts on last year’s events in Madrid , and I’ll do the same now exactly one year on. Gladly. Gladly because I love the direction the AMEC community is going.

I don’t intend to repeat any of the substance and lengthy and valuable commentary to my post last year – which I just enjoyed rereading, thank you. But I have taken the opportunity to append here the Slideshare that accompanied my assertions and that has accrued over three thousand views would you believe.

Perhaps one of my responses to the comments on last year’s post is worth noting quickly, a response to Don Bartholomew:

I don’t think of myself as a member of the measurement industry for the simple reason that I’m not! Rather, my company is a management consultancy helping organisations benefit from social media and related technologies. Our purview is very much about business performance, about organisational alignment for brilliant execution.

It’s not about media

I believe the focus on outcomes in recent years is getting people to look up from media. AMEC is the Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication, not “of Media”, and I’d go further than that. Here are some of my core assertions of recent years:

The Mozilla Manifesto amplified, from Internet to organization

Mon, 09 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Inspired by the analogy of organization-as-software, and indeed the reality of organization-as-software , what might it look like to take a manifesto about software and digital networks and apply it to human networks and organization?

In my recent presentation, The Future of Organization , I took the majority of the Mozilla manifesto and replaced references to the Internet with references to organization. I liked the result so much I thought I’d post it separately here for ease of reference.

Organization is software

Mon, 02 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post is about an exciting vista for organization, one that may sound unhuman on the face of it but which, in contrast, I think could serve human dignity very well.

I first presented it in my Future of Organization video May 23rd, a presentation that appears to have been well received (and the accompanying Slideshare accrued over 2000 views in the week). Given the variety and perceptiveness of the comments the video garnered I’m particularly pleased to have excused the presentation up front as being far from comprehensive. Pete Burden picked up on building inclusiveness and sustainability, and humanity, pointing me to this webpage on concious business . And soulfulness was at the heart of a similar exchange with Frederic Laloux, author of Reinventing Organizations . (I consequently elevated the book to the top of my to-read pile and at page 36 I’m enjoying it very much so far.)

Mr. Wirearchy himself, Jon Husband , was good enough to ’tweet out’ (appended here). And my dear friend Gabbi Cahane wondered what balance of my living in the future and living in the present might be best for business. Hmm, good point :-)

In this post, I’m referring to what I’ve named Bread incorporated – a distributed, self-regulating, incorruptible, frictionless market for organization. Here’s the slide in question and the transcript:

Access to this search result is denied, unless you have the money of course

Fri, 30 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Today, Google has published a webpage with a form allowing anyone in Europe to ask that personal data be removed from search results. This follows the recent ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union, deciding that:

Indexing information by a search engine is ‘processing of personal data’
Google is a ‘controller’ of personal data
Spanish data protection law is applicable, even if indexing happens in the US
Google should remove links to webpages containing personal data, even if the webpages themselves are lawful
A fair balance should be sought between the legitimate interests of search engine users and the privacy rights of individuals
The right to be forgotten is recognised by the Court of Justice.

I’ve owned the domains forgetweb.com and forgetweb.org since 2010, so this is something I’ve contemplated for some time and the domain names betray my leaning, yet I can confidently say the Court has got it wrong. Julian David, techUK CEO, explains why in The Telegraph: “Forget about it: the ECJ ruling on the ‘right to be forgotten’ is unworkable .” I support his balanced sentiment 100% and would add one more vitally important perspective.

The Future of Organization – a video presentation on the major themes and some new provocations

Fri, 23 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a lot to think about when it comes to the future of organization, and plenty to be optimistic about. Saying that, like any and all topics worth grappling with, it takes a bit of time to get up to speed on the depth and breadth of things. As a member of the advisory council for the Future of Work community, and part of the steering group for The Responsive Organization community, I know I’m not the only one looking to communicate these ideas effectively.

Mike Grafham and I talked about compiling a three-minute explanatory video, and I failed woefully at such brevity. This 42-minute video presentation aims to provide a relatively speedy immersion in some of the main themes, spanning human rights, complexity science, the death of heuristics, the six influence flows, personal knowledge mastery, social physics, trust, the digital nervous system, Web 3.0, performance and learning, public relations, collective intelligence, sociocracy, Holacracy, podularity, wirearchy, emergent civilzation, self-organization, organized self, socioveillance, the middleware corporate, Bread incorporated, distributed autonomous corporates, and the Mozilla manifesto.

[embed width=“960”]http://www.vimeo.com/96201589[/embed]

Fancy a coffee? Social business and your non-solicitation terms

Mon, 12 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The recent antitrust lawsuit against Apple, Google, Adobe and Intel for collusion in hiring practices demonstrates a lack of respect for the respective organisations’ employees. Fundamentally, how dare one’s employer collude with another in ways that may limit one’s career progression!

Having been an employer carrying the not insubstantial costs of hiring I know how difficult it is to watch someone in whom you have invested considerable time, money and energy walk out the door, but I think my memory serves me well when I say we encouraged the team to celebrate such departures. If anything, our alumni network grew +1 each time.

The efficiency fallacy in the #responsiveorg context

Sat, 10 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I’m at the #responsiveorg unconference in London today, and I’m on the hunt for dissensus rather than the echoic chamber of the converted preaching to the converted, as warm and lovely as that feels. So with that in mind, let me kick the tyres of one of the primary assumptions underpinning the #responsive org manifesto .

From Efficiency to Responsiveness – Historically, competitive advantages came from optimizing for efficiency and labor productivity of standardized product, with companies such as Walmart and Ford being common examples. As the flow of information increases, the competitive advantage is held by the organization that can react the fastest to new information. Companies achieve increased responsiveness by reducing the friction of information flow, increasing their iteration rate, decreasing their cost of failure, and optimizing their structures for adaptability.

This I like. I don’t however agree that this means we should face-off efficiency and responsive (the main image heading this post is taken from the current #responsiveorg slideshare, embedded below fyi). The following table, which coincidentally featured in my very last post (Doing the triple loop – profound leadership ), expains why:

Doing the triple loop – profound leadership

Thu, 24 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Drucker

Peter F. Drucker asserted: “What’s measured improves.” I’m a sucker for measurement and organizational learning as you can see from the posts tagged as such here – perhaps it’s something to do with my engineering training.

I advocate tapping extant business performance management process to effect the evolution towards social business (on this blog , on briansolis.com , on stoweboyd.com , in the Balanced Scorecard Report ), and that means getting to grips with the Balanced Scorecard and similar approaches.

The lexicon of performance management often involves so-called single-loop and double-loop learning, but a third loop gets less airtime in my experience. So as we debate the types of organizational design conducive to the potential and aspirations of social business – in the Future of Work , Responsive Org and Enterprise 2.0 communities for example – I thought I’d post the following table outlining ways to think about the loops.

The Internetome

Fri, 18 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Just going back through some archives and found the definition I developed for the Internetome conference in 2010. Sponsored by Intel , Qualcomm and the Consumer Electronics Association , it was, I believe, the UK’s first all-day Internet of Things conference. The conference website bit the dust some time during my subsequent server migrations, so for posterity, particularly as everyone is talking about the Internet of Things these days …

Enterprise social networks and assimilation – resistance is futile

Wed, 16 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Enterprise social networking is perfectly suited for the so-called onboarding process.

I say so-called because no dictionary I have lists the word, which is sort of at odds with the fact that they do list the rather unlovely deplane. But I digress. I heard this same claim from Jive , SAP (Jam) and IBM (Connections) at a Eurocloud event last week courtesy of Alan and David @agile_elephant .

It seems academics prefer the phrase organizational socialization, defined as :

a learning and adjustment process that enables an individual to assume an organizational role that fits both organizational and individual needs. It is a dynamic process that occurs when an individual assumes a new or changing role within an organization.

I’ve been onboarded. Into the Mars way back in the day. Mars prides itself on high performance enabled by a strong culture, and boy were my colleagues keen that I got that culture.

The presentations last week (rather than my time at Mars, promise) prompted me to look up the Wikipedia entry for the Borg , the reason for which will become obvious by reading this if you’re unfamiliar with the species:

Employee advocacy – rather uncomfortable and somewhat forced

Tue, 08 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I described the relatively recent concept of employee advocacy in my last post as “rather uncomfortable and somewhat forced”, and I’ve been asked to qualify this description.

Firstly, it’s worth stating the obvious – the aspiration that employees might advocate the employer is hardly a new idea. But this relatively new desire to go about it more systematically is prompted by employees’ increasing social media activity. While recommending an employer down the pub leaves no discernible trace, doing so online does, and that appears to have internal comms, HR professionals and social media types hot under the dollar.

But here’s the rub. Genuine employee advocacy remains a consequence. That’s always been the case and will always remain so.

You can’t insist. You can’t take control of employee social media profiles. You can’t pick out people for failing to advocate, not without creating the kind of culture that’s counter to employee advocacy.

There’s influence in everything an organization does, and sometimes in what it does not do .

The organization (a collection of people, mostly employees) influences the participating individuals (mostly employees) who influence those beyond the payroll. The culture and policies and behaviours that sway whether that influence is constructive or destructive play out long before Fred lets fly on Facebook and Tina trills on Twitter.

Organization and personal reputation – from first principles to distributed autonomy

Fri, 04 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I’m no etymologist but it seems the verb organize appeared in the 15th Century a few decades before the noun organization . Sometimes we forget that the organization, in terms of the institution or firm, is merely a means to an end, and putting legal entities to one side for the moment, an organization is simply a group of people organized around a common purpose.

Reminding ourselves of such first principles is useful when considering how we might create and nurture new forms of organization and how we might improve the current dominant ones.

Jumping forward over 500 years, let’s get bang up to date on so-called social business, aka Enterprise 2.0 , aka Responsive Organization , aka Future of Work . The question that concludes Attenzi - a social business story exemplifies the new vista:

Do you help all the individuals associated with your organization (employees, customers, partners, suppliers, shareholders, etc.) build worthwhile relationships with each other and others, coalescing by need and desire, knowledge and capability and shared values, to create shared value?

The verb coalesce conveys the facility to combine, and so the facility to recombine, and re-recombine. The coalescence remains for just as long as shared value is created, and created faster than a new combination might afford. Such process appeals to free marketers for whom efficiency and utilisation are front of mind – after all why should resources be tied up in one combination when they can add greater value faster deployed in another? And there’s equal appeal to those on the left of the political spectrum who champion self-management and occupational autonomy.

Relationships

Sometimes I define social business as relationships at scale , and not just in the CRM 1.0 way:

Good business is about cooperative and interdependent relationships, always has been, yet the humanity was lost when organizations scaled way up during the 20th Century. We want to make those relationships more human again, but the answer can’t be to scale it all back down. We have to scale something else up.

#PRredefined

Mon, 31 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

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 .)

Organizational performance – a private conversation that should have been public and is now

Fri, 28 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This is a conversation between Adam Pisoni , Stowe Boyd and me relating to a guest post I made to Brian Solis’ blog, Impatience is a Virtue – What’s Next for Social Business .

The conversation played out on email, which is ironic given that all three of us advocate “working out loud” unless confidentiality precludes it. I take the blame for emailing in the first place and hope to make up for the transgression by publishing it now. I have removed those conversational niceties that pepper emails, inserted some helpful hyperlinks and comments in square brackets by way of explaining some of the terms used and topics raised, and tweaked a few things to improve readability here.

[Photo of Adam by Intel Free Press . Photo of Stowe by Paul J Corney .]

Adam

Honestly, one of the most enlightening aspects of finally working within a real, big enterprise [Microsoft acquired Yammer in 2012] is the affect of performance management and budgets. Yammer loved to yell at our large customers to just change how they worked. That anyone at any level could affect change. But what you see inside large companies is that really good people will do all the wrong things either because they eventually feel pressured to optimize for what they are incentivised to do, or because their scope of power is too narrow to affect any change. This happens with budgets all the time. Two people in different parts of the org may have an idea that could make the company lots of money, but since the budgets were set up a year in advance, they can’t shift the money between them.

The social business mutuality stack

Tue, 18 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Can you tell by looking at a photo like this if it’s of a sunrise or a sunset? Absent knowledge of the time of day or the direction in which it was taken, I think not. Just as well I’m talking about both a start and a finish here then.

Sun-setting

First, the crap that’s finishing – that would be public relations as spin. That would be lying, or inauthentic manipulation at best. That would be attempting to build and maintain a façade in the vain hope that customers, employees, investors and partners, present and future, confuse the façade for the real thing. As the saying goes, you can fool some of the people some of the time, but not so many for so long now that everyone packs a smartphone.

Enough has been written on this topic for me to hope that you’ll agree, or at least concur the trend is well established. As one of my characters in Attenzi points out :

If ‘perception is reality’ was the saying that characterized our approach to marketing and public relations before, we now have to consider that reality is perception.

Sun-rising

When I first learned of the excellence theory of public relations I was immediately attracted to it. What’s not to like? It’s constructed on the basis that we use communication to negotiate with the public, resolve conflict and promote mutual understanding and respect between the organisation and its stakeholders. It describes a management function focused on this two-way communication to foster mutually beneficial relationships.

Toward a Model of Work Redesign for Better Work and Better Life

Tue, 11 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Toward a Model of Work Redesign for Better Work and Better Life (PDF), abstract:

Flexible work accommodations provided by employers purport to help individuals struggling to manage work and family demands. The underlying model for change is accommodation – helping individuals accommodate their work demands with no changes in the structure of work or cultural expectations of ideal workers. The purpose of this article is to derive a Work Redesign Model and compare it with the Accommodation Model. This article centers around two change initiatives – Predictability, Teaming and Open Communication and Results Only Work Environment – that alter the structure and culture of work in ways that enable better work and better lives.

ZiL Lane 2.0 - the new killer app for the interwebs

Fri, 28 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The pitch for this new product is simple:

The Internet is the most important infrastructure we’ve ever created, so we mustn’t neglect it. We need to build infrastructure for fast, pervasive and inclusive connectivity. We need to invest.

And where should the money come from? It’s obvious. Those who use today’s infrastructure freely for their commercial gain should pay for the privilege. Blockbuster paid for its own video rental shops, so why shouldn’t Netflix pay to deliver its products down our pipes?

For-profit companies cannot expect a free ride. They pay. We all benefit.

So, are you buying ZiL Lane 2.0?

Net neutrality and ZiL Lanes

Net neutrality is a simple principle integral to the original design of the Internet and, to many minds including mine, absolutely essential to it. The principle asserts that the network will not prioritise – and by inference discriminate – some traffic over other traffic based on where it’s come from. Sure, we’re all happy to prioritise traffic constituting a video feed over email because who cares if the email takes another tenth of a second to arrive, but we should not for example allow those who operate the Internet infrastructure to prioritise one party’s video feed over another.

Why?

Big data. Big trust.

Thu, 27 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This morning, my colleague Hector Arthur pointed me to a new report from Ovum’s Mark Little knowing I’d have a few comments to make. In the corresponding blog post – “Big Trust is Big Data’s missing DNA ” – Mark kicks off with:

In the rush to monetize customer data, companies risk diminishing the trust people have in services and brands. Sustaining and growing people’s trust in services is not just about “doing the right thing,” but also makes commercial sense.

As I like to say in other words, big data is worth more when wielded with customers rather than at them. Ovum calls this approach Big Trust.

Big Trust strategies are designed to build “trust equity” with customers as a basis for making core services stickier, for selling new services, and for brokering personal data to commerce under a new set of trust principles.

Public relations

The outlook is informed, directly or indirectly I know not, by the excellence theory of public relations presented by James E Grunig more than twenty years ago, which champions the two-way symmetrical PR model. This model uses communication to negotiate with the public, resolve conflict and promote mutual understanding and respect between the organization and its stakeholders. My Six Influence Flows model from 2011 extends this work for the digital / social / big data age, and you can find out more about PR models in my post here if it’s your thing.

Of course, this is not how the majority of practitioners practice PR, deferring instead to publicity and ‘spin’, which may be associated more closely with distrust than trust. But excellent practice is championed if, as a shrewd procurer, you know where to look.

"Our goal is to become a social business but how do we get the revolution started?"

Tue, 25 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

During a deep and meaningful conversation recently, my interlocutor declared:

Our goal is to become a social business but how do we get the revolution started?

This post addresses two problems integral to this statement.

A means not an end

Social business is a fairly fuzzy concept at the best of times. Some consider it synonymous with terms such as Enterprise 2.0, Agile Business, Responsive Organization, and Future Work, whereas others more deeply invested in any one may argue the differences. For the record, I describe social business by way of the following challenge:

Do you help all the individuals associated with your organization (employees, customers, partners, suppliers, shareholders, etc.) build worthwhile relationships with each other and others, coalescing by need and desire, knowledge and capability and shared values, to create shared value?

Shared values

Some pundits prefer to talk about shared purpose rather than shared values, and I think this may well be akin to Stowe Boyd differentiating between collaboration and cooperation with shared purpose relating to collaboration and shared values relating to cooperation. In his words :

Likes and dislikes of curating Social Business Design magazine for Flipboard

Tue, 18 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Social Business is such a nascent, deep and wide topic that I couldn’t do my thinking or clients justice without reading a lot. Everyday. So it occurred to me that if I’m taking the time to do this, then it makes sense to take a few seconds more to act as a filter and pass on the best bits to others.

I began curating a Flipboard magazine at the tail end of 2013. Flipboard tells me that the resulting magazine, Social Business Design , currently contains 210 articles and has attracted 128 readers.

Here’s what I like and what I don’t like about the process. Perhaps the upsides might prompt you to curate one yourself, and perhaps the Flipboard team might take note of the downsides. They do listen – Flipboard CEO Mike McCue (@mmccue ) has taken the time to respond to me via Twitter, as have several of his colleagues.

I like

Flipping

I like the simplicity. Drag the “flip it” bookmarklet from the Flipboard website to your browser’s bookmarks bar and you’re all set up. When I’m reading an article I decide to flip, I just click the bookmarklet and a little window appears, just like this:

Customer-centricity

Thu, 06 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Customer-centricity is an organizational point of view, not a customer point of view. It’s actually the organization-centric-view-of-the-customer. … Don’t you want CRM to help you and the customer mutually, allowing you both to manage the relationship? Surely the value of your understanding how influence goes around comes around is enhanced when those you interact with have similar understanding. Or would you rather propagate the status quo – CRM as a construct to manage the customer?

Stowe Boyd's manifesto and The People's Front

Thu, 02 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Stowe Boyd recently published “A Manifesto For A Third Way Of Work” (although the title will change ). The manifesto forms the basis of the book Stowe plans to write throughout 2014, crystallizing the perspectives and insight he has forged and assembled over the years. And if you’ve read Attenzi – a social business story then you’ll know Stowe and I think alike on many matters.

[Update 20th March 2014: the title changed to A Manifesto For A New Way of Work .]

Here are the major theses, and I have identified with an asterisk the four I have chosen to argue below.

_____

Dissensus (versus Consensus)

— active and directed dissent is a better way to counter the cognitive biases of groups and individuals, and to sidestep groupthink; essential to increased innovation and creativity truly driving business

Cooperative (versus Collaborative)

— sidesteps the politics and collectivism of consensus-based decision-making, and shifts to looser, laissez-faire cooperative work patterns

Creativity (versus Tradition)

— new solutions to problems are needed, and traditional approaches may not only be broken but dangerous

Autonomy (versus Heteronomy)

— paradoxically, as we come into a time when we acknowledge that we are more connected to each other than ever before, a great degree of autonomy will become the norm; old demands to subordinate all personal interests to those of the collective will be displaced by a personal re-engagement in our own work and a commitment to a deeper work culture that transcends any one company’s corporate culture

Why I self-published this time

Mon, 30 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Social business in 2014 and your last ever New Year's resolution

Tue, 17 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve all done it.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a professional data driven content marketer, or some poor soul who’s been told to conjure up the December post for the company blog, the temptation to write that post about the looming New Year is, well, too tempting.

If you’re looking for real link fodder, best include a call to action and sell the idea that something may be learned and put into valuable action before Santa boots up Google Maps, post title bait such as:

You have to deal with both complication and complexity, so you'd better know the difference

Thu, 05 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

The Schumpeter column in The Economist got it wrong: “It’s complicated. Management thinkers disagree on how to manage complexity. ” The column comments on the recent 5th Global Drucker Forum – Managing Complexity and describes organizations as having two choices, deal with complexity or simplify.

Those that deal with complexity “may look complex and unwieldy but they have an inner logic and powers of self-organisation.” In contrast, “the second, rival solution to dealing with complexity is to impose simplicity.”

But to present the situation as ’either / or’ is simply misleading, and I think it comes down to a failure to appreciate the critical difference between complexity and complication, a difference that must be well understood when redesigning the way your organisation works.

"Social business is dead!" ... "Whatever!"

Mon, 11 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Published as a guest post on briansolis.com , Friday 8th November 2013, in response to Chris Heuer’s post “Social Business is Dead! Long Live What’s Next! ”

As he finished a game of Cut The Rope on his iPhone, my young godson asked what my phone was like when I was his age. I broke it down for him. I was in my twenties before someone offered to take north of ten thousand dollars for a basic digital camera, and not much less for a GPS device. And I got my first basic mobile phone (I explained that means just making phone calls and sending text messages) as I approached thirty.

A few days later, as she dispatched her umpteenth snapchat of the morning, my niece asked me why I obviously enjoy what I do for a living. Imagine a whole lifetime, I replied, during which the only innovation was a tweak to the angle of the plow shear.

Scientists and engineers have been good to us. We’ve come to expect serious technological innovation with the regularity of the seasons. So, just like Chris Heuer, I’m more than ready for corresponding organizational change.

Now.

As in right now!

Having reflected briefly on the vast progression of the Internet and the web, computing, mobile infrastructure and social media services – as if you needed a reminder – let’s look at what’s changed at the typical organization during this time, my adult lifetime. Or more pertinently what hasn’t.

Strategic Public Relations Leadership

Thu, 24 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I learned this week about the Cockpit-in-Court , an early London theatre that stood where we find 70 Whitehall today. Apparently, it did as the name conveys host cockfights, although they stopped as long ago as the Jacobean times. The current building includes Kent ’s Treasury, built 1733-37.

I attended an event in Kent’s Treasury this week at the kind invitation of Professor Anne Gregory and Paul Willis of the Centre for Public Relations Studies at Leeds Business School , hosted by Alex Aitken, Executive Director of Government Communications, to celebrate the launch of Strategic Public Relations Leadership.

[Google books , Amazon.co.uk , Amazon.com , Routledge , BookDepository , Waterstone’s , WHSmith , Blackwell ]

The vision we have for social business at Euler Partners is built up and out from public relations in its “excellence theory” manifestation (rather than the various flavours of publicity and spin with which some readers may be more familiar). It is a fundamental, and one that has too rarely contributed all it has to give to organisational success, and Anne and Paul believe the time has come for public relations professionals to step up to the mark. They cite the increasing complexity of the modern organisation as reason enough:

This context requires public relations professionals to be able to clearly articulate and demonstrate their own contribution to organisational effectiveness. This textbook provides public relations leaders with a framework to do this, as well as a checklist of essential capabilities which they must acquire and exhibit if they are to operate at the highest levels of any organisation.

I’m delighted to have provided a “product description” in Amazon’s terminology or, in the jargon of the publishing industry, a “book blurb” for the back cover:

The authors write “an organisation’s reputation is determined not by expert publicity programs, but the alignment of declared and enacted values as judged by those with whom it has a relationship.” If you understand what this means, this book will help you make it happen. If you don’t understand what this means, you should read this book. Given the compelling association the authors identify between public relations excellence and organisational leadership, it can only benefit your career trajectory.

3M ThinkTANK conference – getting down to social business

Fri, 27 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

[Edited 7th October to embed the event video and move the slidestack to the end.] http://youtu.be/UkhXr4u9 _J4 I’ve been hosted by 3M today in Minneapolis St. Paul, and what great hosts too… a fantastic team and an incredible company heritage to boot. I could have spent a whole day exploring the Innovation Center, which is so well done I’m sure it brings out the geek in just about everyone.

Gregory Gerik is 3M’s transformation social media leader, and he led the design and delivery of the 3M ThinkTANK conference today. Kicked off beautifully with a keynote by Brian Solis , we’ve been provoked, informed and entertained by:

An introduction to Web 3.0 for Social Data Week

Tue, 17 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Next week is Social Media Week . That’s well known. What’s less well known is that this is Social Data Week , and this facet of social underpins a lot of the stuff on next week’s agenda. Nevertheless, many people with social in their job description, from public relations to marketing to ‘digital’, are not yet fluent in the data foundations.

One aspect of social data that particularly excites me is the Semantic Web, often referred to as Web 3.0. According to Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, Web 3.0 describes the web as a universal medium for the exchange of data, information and knowledge. It’s an awesome vision that’s playing out right now.

Attenzi, in association with Social Media Today

Sun, 15 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

The first edition of Attenzi - a social business story was published May 2013. And I’m delighted that today sees the publication of the second edition in association with Social Media Today .

Joining the original foreword by Microsoft Yammer co-founder and CTO, Adam Pisoni, is a new foreword by Social Media Today founder and CEO, Robin Carey. The book also has a new front cover and an additional chapter.

Share This Too

Mon, 09 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Ever since we started the CIPR Social Media Panel we’ve been a pro-active bunch. I haven’t got the stats to prove it, but I’d bet the panel is the most active CIPR group. We launched the successful “Social Summer ” sessions, developed Wikipedia guidance (subsequently adopted by equivalent organisations in Canada, Australia and South Africa), created CIPR TV , published the CIPR Social Media Guidance , updated the CIPR’s own social policy, published the CIPR Guide to Social Media Monitoring , and much more.

What, exactly, is social business?

Tue, 09 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I’m kicking off #SCRM13 in London this morning. SCRM stands for social customer relationship management, and my role today is to get some energy into the room and, hopefully, encourage delegates to look up from simply slapping “social” onto business as normal.

Unfortunately, that’s precisely what many have been charged with doing. Those with appropriate powers of persuasion will effect organizational change I’m sure, but more to the point I feel that more chief executives need to attend Luke ’s conferences, a sentiment I’m sure he’d endorse.

Measuring Public Relations – a presentation

Thu, 27 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I was invited to kick off the CharityComms “Made to Measure Communications” event today. Being a fan of measurement, or business performance management more widely, I’m always excited about meeting new people and sharing ideas and insights, but given that many find the topic a little dry to say the least, I’m grateful for any and all interaction and enthusiasm event attendees might muster. And today’s audience didn’t let me down, so thank you for that.

Social media measurement, after Madrid

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

What, exactly, is the value of social? This was the question I sought to help answer in my slidestack ahead of the AMEC European Summit in Madrid earlier this month. And it was the overarching question that informed much of the three days of debate, discussion and deliberation.

This post is about two related developments – the latest from “The Conclave ” (aka the #SMMStandards Coalition), and “A New Framework for Social Media Metrics and Measurement”.

Measurement standards

“Perhaps the most important Social Media launch of the year ” is how Katie Delahaye Paine portrays it. This is so-Katie that I can actually hear her saying it right now (as she might hear me cry “the most exciting development in PR since the Cluetrain ”!)

Katie refers to a suite of social media measurement standards that represents the work of a collection of organisations (including AMEC, a full list is appended here ) informally referred to as The Conclave. Following 18 months of long conference-calls, meetings, slidestacks and email threads, we have posted standards for:

A presentation to the Open Mobile Alliance conference on big data

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

According to its website, the Open Mobile Alliance “was formed in June 2002 by the world’s leading mobile operators, device and network suppliers, information technology companies and content and service providers. OMA delivers open specifications for creating interoperable services that work across all geographical boundaries, on any bearer network.”

The OMA met today in Dublin to discuss aspects of big data, and I was invited to present on personal data, social media and social business.

The meaning of social business

Thu, 30 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

[Also published on Microsoft’s #bizremagined website .]

I’m fascinated by innovations in the language of innovation. Is it the inclinations of the innovator or the characteristics of the innovation that suggests new words and phrases? When and why is existing lexicon deemed inadequate? Why do we embrace some expressions yet others wither and die?

A quick browse at netlingo.com turns up such beauties as advermation, mouse potato, and idea hamster. All new to me, and for all I know dead already. I had a go a few years ago with Internetome to describe the physical manifestations of the Internet of Things, and let’s just say the word hasn’t made the Oxford English. Yet.

Enter the phrase “social business”, bandied around with increasing frequency. What is it exactly?

Well perhaps this particular turn of phrase is sufficiently nascent to mean different things to different people. The candidate meanings form a spectrum to my mind, with “an organisation that uses social media” at one end (with the hashtags #socmed and #socbiz used interchangeably), and a deep, transformative opportunity at the other. Whether or not such a profound transformation ends up being labelled social business, we’ve tried hard at Euler Partners to articulate what it might mean in less ambiguous terms.

What, exactly, is the value of social?

Wed, 29 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

The past several months have been hectic for the steering teams at AMEC and The Conclave ahead of the AMEC European Summit in Madrid, 5th - 7th June. We’ve been trying to pull together a cohesive and cogent set of definitions for social media measurement, and my last post described just one such workstream, on defining influence .

It’s gone very well so far I think, not least due to the earnest leadership from people like Barry Leggetter, Katie Delahaye Paine, Richard Bagnall and David Rockland. So well in fact that we’re now left training our attention on perhaps the biggest question of them all: What’s the value to my organization of doing all this stuff?

Influencing Influencer Marketing

Fri, 24 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

WOMMA ’s new guidance on influencer marketing begins with the assertion: “This is not an update to the 2008 WOMMA Influencer Handbook - this is a complete rewrite …”

I’m not a WOMMA member but I am a special adviser to AMEC and The Conclave , and it was in this capacity that Brad Fay and I invested more than a few hours with WOMMA’s Neil Beam to lend our insight and points of view and, we hope, help make this guidebook the complete rewrite it’s turned out to be.

I’ve expressed Euler Partners’ approach to influence in recent posts, notably “Influence - request for comments ” (slidestack included below for your convenience), and we were delighted to have the opportunity to present these to the WOMMA team. In particular:

Attenzi - a social business story

Wed, 15 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

My new ebook is out today .

I’m really excited about it because I’m excited about its topic, social business. With a foreword by Adam Pisoni, Microsoft Yammer co-founder and CTO, here’s how the book is presented.

Attenzi – a social business story shines a light on social business that goes beyond the all too typical homages to social media. It’s a relatively short and easy read intended to help readers explore what social business means for their organization, marketplace, communities and career.

What is social business?

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

[Originally written for the CIPR Friday Roundup.]

I’ve been writing Friday Roundups for five and a half years and this is my last one. The circulation has grown from eleven to nearly eleven thousand, we merged it into the CIPR three years ago, and I’m delighted it’s carrying on in their safe hands.

We have covered the full gamut of PR topics in this time, but a tag cloud of the 275 roundups would probably need to render “social media” in font size 100!

Increasingly however accomplished social media practitioners are asking a most pertinent question – now what? Well, it appears the answer to that is acquiring the name “social business”, and it’s increasingly been my focus of recent times. You might say social media are the eggs in the social business cake.

I’ve tried to design one question to both convey what social business might be exactly and to give the person attempting an answer real pause for thought in relation to their own organisation. I think I’m making progress with the following question, what do you think?…

How dare they!

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

[Written originally for the CIPR Friday Roundup .]

You should not make edits to a Wikipedia entry when you have a conflict of interest, as any PR practitioner does in relation to their employer or client. Simple.

This Wikipedia rule is reflected precisely in the CIPR’s Wikipedia guidance , published by the social media panel last summer and supported by PR bodies in Canada, Australia and South Africa. (Although not yet in the US.)

Influence – request for comments

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I’m chairing a session at midday today at the Social Media Measurement & Monitoring conference on selecting social media metrics. Joining me on the panel are Katie Delahaye Paine, Andrew Smith, Matt Owen, and Jacqui Taylor.

See you there?

To coincide with this event, I’m calling for comments regarding the standards setting process for the concept of influence ahead of the AMEC European Summit in June. Please take a look at this stack, and influence proceedings :-)

'Masterclass' at Bournemouth University

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Professor Tom Watson (@tomwatson1709 , @historyofpr ) invited me to deliver a ‘masterclass’ lecture at Bournemouth University on Friday. (When asked about PR higher education in the UK, most people would mention Bournemouth and Leeds Metropolitan.)

Student elections were at fever pitch, and there was a real energy about campus. The students at The Media School were on top form – in fact, I usually only get the calibre of questions they threw at me days or weeks after someone has digested my book or a presentation. So thanks to everyone who attended and participated.

Dell Social Media Predictions 2013

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I enjoy Full Gesture Communication™ in Unaugmented Reality™ (#fauxtrademarks). As amazing as social media is becoming, it’s still no full substitute for eye-to-eye interaction. I met the co-founding CTO of Yammer this week, Adam Pisoni , and our conversation came to life immediately in a way that I don’t believe would be as easy to kindle pixel-to-pixel.

Here’s an interesting question I think. Can you distinguish in your mind the kinds of online relationships you have with people you see physically from time to time from those you’ve yet to meet? I believe you probably can, and probably do.

GREAT (PR)ODUCT

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I have asked six people with senior positions in techie professions who they thought “does great PR” in the tech sector. Now these individuals are not in marketing and PR functions, so you’ll forgive my casual turn of phrase I hope.

You might know I detest the idea that you might “PR something”, as if PR is as tactical and atomic as picking up the phone or putting a release on a wire, but I deliberately didn’t wish to infect them with my view of public relations excellence. I wanted to hear what they’d say unprompted, unguided.

Each proffered two or three companies. Samsung and IBM were mentioned twice. Google thrice. But out front with four mentions was Apple.

Now anyone who follows the world’s first or second largest publicly traded corporation in the world by market capitalization (it swaps places regularly with Exxon Mobil) will know that they’re actually quite a secretive bunch. Steve Jobs infected the company with the idea that it knows what’s best for the customer, and any idea that it should work with the rest of us in defining future products and services appears plain counter-cultural.

If you, like me, define public relations as pursuing mutual understanding to build goodwill , the PR function at Apple appears quite asymmetric. As and when it suits its agenda, they’ll tell you. Otherwise get back in line. End of. I always feel a reluctance on Apple’s part to discuss its contractors’ labour practices , its own environmental and business practices, and the occasional product mess up .

Setting the standards for influence

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a special advisor to AMEC (the Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication), wearing a CIPR hat as and when. I’m part of a working group assembling recommendations on the topic of influence for deliberation at the AMEC European Summit in Madrid this June. We have input from IPR, PRSA, Womma, SNCR, IAB and other groups, associations and institutes.

I took an action to create “something to shoot at”, and I distributed the following over the weekend. On the basis that we’re an open and transparent working group, I thought I’d post it here too. Do get in touch if you’d like to tell me what you think. Now’s the time for dialogue – particularly if you can’t attend the Madrid summit – ahead of the standards setting.

A Measure Of Influence – IABC Communication World magazine

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Jessica Burnette-Lemon is Senior Editor of Communication World , the IABC ’s member magazine. I had the pleasure of talking with Jessica on the topical and some might say controversial topic of influence (in the context of marketing and PR of course).

The resultant article appears in the current issue of the magazine, but because it’s a publication for members’ eyes only, I can’t add a link here.

Do you believe it?

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

[Originally written for the CIPR Friday Roundup .]

The 2007 report from the Arthur W. Page Society, The Authentic Enterprise , identified four new leadership priorities and skills demanded of the Chief Communications Officer:

Leadership in defining and instilling company values
Leadership in building and managing multi-stakeholder relationships
Leadership in enabling the enterprise with ‘new media’ skills and tools; and
Leadership in building and managing trust, in all its dimensions.

The report marked the beginning of a rethink at the Society that culminated last year in Building Belief: A New Model .

Social Media Management Buyer’s Guide

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

[Originally posted to Euler Partners .]

We kicked off our New Year speaking with the eConsultancy team about the upcoming update to their successful Social Media Management Buyer’s Guide 2011 . Here’s a rundown of the questions Amy Rodgers put to us and our responses.

1) What are the most important trends occurring in this market?

Maintaining one system for external social media management and workflow, and another system for “buzz monitoring”, and another system for enterprise social networking looks increasingly disjointed. We have media to communicate, and we communicate to influence, and influence flows are the lifeblood of mutual understanding, knowledge building and decision-making. Maintaining technological islands for influence flows with one group of stakeholders (eg, customers) distinct from another island for influence flows with another group of stakeholders (eg, employees) effectively ‘misses the trick’. It fails to recognise that today’s organisations must strive to be more than the sum of the payroll.

Destroying the web

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

[Written for the CIPR Friday Roundup .]

The Internet is the most powerful, flexible and critical infrastructure ever invented. Every aspect of our daily lives is supported by this wondrous invention.

But here’s the important thing.

We’ve passed the point where the fabric of our societies is supported by the Internet – the all pervasive Internet increasingly defines that fabric. Its architecture is becoming our architecture, and that is why any motion to challenge or change the way in which the Internet is governed must be subject to the most critical eye.

I’ve been on tenterhooks the past fortnight watching the deliberations of WCIT play out – the World Conference on International Telecommunications. WCIT is a UN body that has played a vital role over nearly one and a half centuries coordinating telecoms standards and interoperability and radio spectrum and satellite orbits, and it has tried once again to wrestle Internet governance from the hands of the open community that has shepherded it so beautifully to date.

CIPR TV on journalism, PR and the Leveson Inquiry

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I hosted the CIPR TV show on the Leveson Inquiry on Monday. As you may have seen, I wrote about the inquiry for last week’s CIPR Friday Roundup, a day after the publication of the inquiry’s report – Public relations and the ’ethical vacuum’ .

Our guests were Michelle Stanistreet , General Secretary of the National Union of Journalists , and Jane Wilson, CIPR CEO.

Social business webinar with Jay Krall, Cision's Media Research Supremo

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The Cision webinar on 8th November was dedicated to social business , and I was delighted to be the guest in the hot seat. It was great to be able to chat with Jay Krall and answer questions from listeners about the impact of social web and related technologies on organizational structure, culture, process and performance measurement this decade.

I’ve known Jay since we started following each other online several years ago now, and he took part in an Influence Scorecard workshop I ran in New York in 2010. His contributions were invaluable then, and London is better off for having persuaded Jay to upsticks from Chicago. And if ever there was a guy with the most fabulous radio voice…

Public Relations and the "ethical vacuum"

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

[Originally written for the CIPR Friday Roundup .]

“Too many stories in too many newspapers were the subject of complaints from too many people, with too little in the way of titles taking responsibility.” Newspapers have often demonstrated “a significant and reckless disregard for accuracy” and “misrepresentation and embellishment takes place to a degree far greater than could ever be thought of as legitimate or fair comment.”

I’ve just read the Leveson Inquiry , published yesterday and running to nearly two thousand pages. These quotes come from the forty page executive summary. For those of you beyond the UK’s shores, the Inquiry is about the freedom of the press in both the positive and negative manifestations of that expression, with a focus on how we can attenuate the negative.

The UK enjoys a pluralistic media of which other countries are rightly envious, and a free press is central to our national identity. The report quotes Sir Winston Churchill: “A free press is the unsleeping guardian of every other right that free men prize; it is the most dangerous foe of tyranny … Under dictatorship the press is bound to languish … But where free institutions are indigenous to the soil and men have the habit of liberty, the press will continue to be the Fourth Estate, the vigilant guardian of the rights of the ordinary citizen.”

Content Marketing Show 2012

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve just kicked off Content Marketing Show 2012 here in London. Thanks to Kelvin Newman and his team for the opportunity. Here’s my stack.

The Illustrated History of Content

http://youtu.be/wp2eUSL4oHc

Banking your reputation

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

[Written for the CIPR Friday Roundup .]

Matt Ambrose posts this week about Red Hot Openers that Get Readers Eager for More . So here goes…

The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) enables financial institutions worldwide to send and receive information about financial transactions in a secure, standardized and reliable environment.

How am I doing so far Matt? :-)

Seriously, SWIFT matters to you this week. This member owned co-operative is actually at the cutting edge of dealing with your 21st Century currency – your data. And as I posted a month ago, data is this decade’s number one revolution .

If you accept that your data is your reputation (credit scoring is over 40 years old), and that your data has value to those who want to understand and serve your needs, then it’s a bit of a shocker that in 2012 you don’t have much control over it.

Are you a professional or a user?

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve never been fond of the word ‘user’? It lacks the caring qualities of a much more appropriate word, customer, and even evokes images of substance abuse.

On making this point, I’m asked what I’d call people benefitting from a service or application without handing over their hard-earned. Well, customers of course. In such situations they’re simply paying with a different currency, such as their personal data and/or attention, which the supplier of the service does its utmost to monetize.

But in one instance, I like that evocation of substance abuse. Of addiction. Of misuse.

Do allow me to explain and let’s see if I’ve just been critical of you or a colleague. Please go easy on me if I have, my intentions are honourable.

I had the privilege of speaking with 150 Masters students at Imperial College London yesterday, taking their Technology in Marketing module. All marketing activity in 2012 is underpinned or impacted by technology, and thousands of tech vendors tempt us with thousands of marketing and PR applications, tools and services. And we buy them. Lots of them. The question is, are you a professional or a user?

What’s the difference?

The CIPR Friday Roundup +/- 5 years

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

[Originally written, obviously, for the CIPR Friday Roundup .]

The Kardashians first appeared in October 2007 just as it was becoming difficult to get a mortgage. I don’t believe the two were related. I also sent out the first Friday Roundup… to eleven recipients.

Five years and 250 editions later (missing out the festive seasons), it’s gone out to 9345 of you, which is fantastic. But let’s look at some more interesting October 2007 facts, spanning the full gamut of topics we’ve covered here for PR professionals.

Facebook had just passed the thirty million user mark, approaching half that reported by MySpace. There were 350,000 of us on Twitter and ten million odd on LinkedIn – now half a billion and 175 million respectively.

There was no Kindle, no Android, no tablets, and no Justin Bieber. Nokia was number one in mobile phones, bigger than numbers 2, 3 and 4 combined. The Blackberry 8800 and the very first iPhone were the executive must-haves.

There was no FourSquare, Groupon, Pinterest, Instagram, Angry Birds, Prezi, Quora, Spotify, Mendeley, Blippar, Dropbox, Tweetdeck or Google+. And these were pre-Chatroulette days too, and pre-Barcelona principles come to that.

Who are you?

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

[Originally written for the CIPR Friday Roundup .]

Identity is not a black and white thing. Sure, at one end of the spectrum anonymity reigns. This is the world of 4chan , the popular image-based bulletin board from which famous memes such as lolcats and Rickrolling emerged. At the other end of the spectrum we have passport border control.

And in between we have many shades of identity.

Nightclub handstamps for example are needed only to ascertain who has already paid. Many a website cookie serves just to determine if you’ve dropped by before. A supermarket loyalty card serves just to build up an understanding of your shopping habits, and may be associated with a bank card proffered for payment.

OK, so what has this got to do with marketing and public relations?

This decade's number one revolution

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

“Data is the new oil." So said Clive Humby back in 2006.

“Data is the new soil” said David McCandless in 2010.

In between, in 2009, Meglena Kuneva , European Consumer Commissioner, said: “Personal data is the new oil of the internet and the new currency of the digital world.”

I’ve long been excited about the advent of big data, and started posting about visualising the stuff back in 2008. If anything distinguishes the modern professional – in marketing, PR, HR, R&D, operations, etc. – from her predecessors, it’s the facility to work with data.

Internal communications discussed on CIPR TV

Fri, 14 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The latest episode of CIPR TV went out live yesterday afternoon, with plenty of interaction from the audience. The programme’s guests are Jenni Wheller (@jenniwheller ), Internal Communications Manager at SSP UK, and Mike Grafham (@mgrafham ), Head of Customer Engagement at Yammer .

I think you’ll agree the audience’s questions and the guests’ responses make for an interesting show. Rather than repeat anything covered in the show, I’ll just take a few paragraphs here to make another observation.

Brand Anarchy

Wed, 12 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The idea of a brand goes back to ancient times when ownership of livestock was asserted by burning one’s mark onto the animal. This post is about a book called Brand Anarchy, so I thought I’d set the scene.

The mark would be applied to the animal with a burning stick known as a firebrand. That word has morphed over the years to describe passionate individuals looking to shake things up, so it is then with etymological pleasure that I note the authors of Brand Anarchy are firebrands.

Social media are the eggs in the social business cake

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

A thrill of working in a fast changing market is the opportunity to innovate. A burden of working in a fast changing market is the need to bend existing language to new concepts. And of course, evoking existing language evokes existing meaning … both an advantage and disadvantage.

So, we’ve been working with social media for the past decade; as if all preceding media was anti-social. And during the past couple of years, we’ve been tasking our tongue to the topic of social business; as if business previously attracted loners.

Planning. Love it.

Fri, 07 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

It’s September already. How did that happen?!

As we approach the final quarter of the calendar year, many of us will have our first thoughts of the 2013 planning process. A few will relish the task. Many more will issue a quiet but discernible sigh.

But while time is still on our hands, perhaps I can offer up a couple of points to place a refreshing perspective on proceedings.

First up, can I ask you what the economy and your particular marketplace will look like this time next year? How about by Easter? Come to that, what will the lie of the land be in January?

Who knows! Let’s face it, we live in uncertain times.

So having acknowledged our lack of visibility, why do we still pivot our discipline around a yearly plan? What exactly have marketing and public relations got in common with the time it takes the Earth to complete a particular cycle around the Sun anyway?

Influence Crowd becomes Euler Partners

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

When George W. Bush was inaugurated for his second term in January 2005, no one uploaded a video to YouTube.

When Italy beat France to win the 2006 FIFA World Cup final, fans didn’t Tweet. Not once. No one in Europe mentioned it on Facebook. No one captured Fabio Grosso scoring the winner on an iPhone. No one jumped on Gmail to commiserate with French friends. No one used BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) to celebrate with Italian friends.

Social media have progressed incredibly quickly and organizations have had to grapple with the challenges and identify and pursue the opportunities.

But things began to get serious during 2009 as it became increasingly apparent that social web and related technologies could transform the way organizations go about their business beyond the domains of marketing, public relations and customer service. It might even redefine what it means to be in business. And that’s when we founded the consultancy Influence Crowd.

By September 2011, when I had the opportunity to address the executive summit at Dreamforce (the annual Salesforce.com conference), this radical landscape had been labelled with a distinct call to action – socialize the enterprise .

BRANDiD + Meanwhile + Seedcamp

Thu, 16 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s some rather good news to lift some of that post-Olympic blues. The BRANDiD team has won gold, literally.

Hundreds of starters were whittled down during recent Seedcamp heats to a couple of dozen top performers. Reading the track perfectly and running a very good race indeed, BRANDiD crossed the finishing line to take its rightful place on the Seedcamp podium – just one of three to make it through the London event. The Seedcamp announcement has just gone live .

It’s been six months since we first blogged about our work with BRANDiD , and we’ve been working hard in the Meanwhile gym since then refining our game. And it feels great to take things to the Seedcamp level.

Too good

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

[Originally written for the CIPR Friday Roundup .]

The headline on my S3 this morning marks a marketing and PR lesson: Cameron urges people to return to capital amid ‘ghost town’ claims .

For the past several months, Londoners have been bombarded with messages begging them to adapt their normal routine during the Olympics period, to question their need to travel, to expect over-crowding and travel chaos in so many words.

FIR Interview: Neville Hobson interviews Stephen Waddington and me about Share This

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Share This , the new book from the CIPR Social Media panel and friends, is selling rather well indeed. Having shot straight in at number 1 on Amazon UK’s best new business book releases, it now resides at number 13 in the Sales & Marketing category.

Wiley, the publisher, has taken more than a handful of bulk orders directly from PR agencies, which of course don’t then register on the Amazon charts else I’m sure the book would be Amazon’s number 1 of course!

Gold

Fri, 27 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

(Originally written for the CIPR Friday Roundup .)

You’ll congratulate me for noticing there’s a sporting event starting today in London town. Too obvious then not to interweave some Olympic statistics into today’s Roundup.

It’s 2579 days (just over seven years) since London won the right to host the 2012 Olympics. The exact price tag is still to be totted up, but we’re looking at somewhere north or south of 10,000,000,000 sterling; four times the original estimate.

The hunt for a new universal measure – we will never find it

Mon, 09 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The title of this post is one of my contributions to the recent PR Week video podcast on measurement where I was a guest alongside SpectrumInsight ’s Mark Westaby. PR Week’s Sara Luker was in the chair, and it was fifteen minutes of good conversation.

As I say upfront, I’m a bit more optimistic than Mark about the future of the measurement and accountability of public relations, if only because I have faith in the Influence Scorecard approach.

Version 1 of Wikipedia guidance for PR practitioners

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

[Update: Version 2 of the Wikipedia guidance was published May 2014 .]

I’m delighted that the first comprehensive guidance to public relations practitioners on engaging with the Wikipedia community is published today by the CIPR. Here’s the process we’ve gone through:

> Early January 2012 – The CIPR Social Media panel meets and recognises that current guidance is lacking (see my post of 6th January )

> Mid-January 2012 – PR Week’s Editor in Chief, Danny Rogers, calls on the CIPR to clarify its guidance to members, and the profession more widely ("CIPR must set bar high on Wikipedia code ")

> January - April 2012 – The Social Media panel’s Gemma Griffiths leads the development of a first draft of guidance; “something to shoot at”

> 12th May 2012 – Neville Hobson and I take part in the Wikimedia UK AGM to call for their help in working up the guidance (see my post of 14th May )

> 14th May 2012 – The first draft is uploaded to Wikimedia UK’s wiki

> To 24th June 2012 – We collaborate with Wikimedians on more than 160 edits on the back of a discussion page running to more than twelve thousand words.

CIPR TV: Wikipedia guidance to PR practitioners to be published next week

Thu, 21 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I swapped sofas on CIPR TV yesterday, seeing the studio from the guests’ perspective for a change. Gemma Griffiths presented the show and David Gerrard and I were the guests.

David is Wikimedia UK’s volunteer spokesperson. As you may know, I’ve been helping to lead a dialogue between Wikimedia UK and the CIPR to build mutual understanding, and specifically to co-develop definitive guidance to PR practitioners on how to engage with the Wikipedia community.

Influence - the use and abuse of the word in social media

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

http://www.slideshare.net/Sheldrake/amec-2012-dublin-european-summit

View more presentations from Philip Sheldrake

The AMEC European Summit is taking place this week in Dublin. It’s a really vibrant event, a credit to AMEC’s Barry Leggetter and the delegates’ enthusiasm. (Actually, perhaps it’s a little less vibrant this morning after the visit last night to the Guiness brewery!)

I’m here representing the CIPR in a couple of sessions, and this morning I’m speaking in my own capacity… my slidestack is embedded above.

Q&A with Influencer Marketing Review

Wed, 06 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

[Originally published by Influencer Marketing Review .]

This is the third installment of our ‘Q&A with the Review’ series in which we talk with prominent members of the influencer marketing community about their work and thoughts on the industry. Amanda Maksymiw and Duncan Brown helped us get the series started, and now we’re grateful that Philip Sheldrake, author of The Business of Influence_, is joining us for our third Q&A._

IMR: Thanks so much for joining us, Philip. And congratulations on the book. We know that’s no easy feat.

****Philip: Thanks for the invitation to chat here. And thanks for having my book cover on IMR’s homepage :-)

IMR: Oh yeah. It’s probably about time we change the image, huh.

You’ve stated in the book and elsewhere that “the business of influence is broken.” What do you mean by that exactly? Some might think there wasn’t much of a “business of influence” in the first place.

Philip: A definition of influence: you have been influenced when you do something you wouldn’t otherwise have done, or think something you wouldn’t otherwise have thought. There’s influence in everything an organization does, and sometimes in what it doesn’t do, and yet despite this we often apportion responsibility for influence to marketing and PR departments. The 2012 organization looks incredibly similar to the 1992 organization, which is crazy when you consider the impact of social media and related information technologies.

The Internet we know and love is at serious risk

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

[Originally written for the CIPR Conversation Friday Roundup .]

Public relations – the pursuit of mutual understanding and goodwill – has been transformed by the Internet. Of that, no regular reader of The Conversation and the Roundup can be in doubt. And yet it is all too easy to take the Internet for granted.

The way the Internet has evolved to date has been critical to the way social media has evolved and our corresponding facilities as citizens, employees and consumers to participate, to innovate, to produce, to mashup, to share and to converse.

The open, decentralized Internet, governed by many stakeholders, is under threat. Right now, several countries, including China and Russia, are proposing to expand the powers of a non-transparent global institution, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), allowing it to change the rules on how our internet is used and governed.

And what’s worse, the ITU won’t even release their negotiating documents to the public or give internet users a seat at the table. The ITU simply isn’t used to public accountability.

Trial rides on the new London Underground, 150 years ago

Fri, 25 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday marked 150 years since the first ’trial ride’ on the London Underground, the first underground railway system in the world. I know this only because I visited the National Portrait Gallery in March and found this photograph (more precisely, this is my photograph of the photograph). The gallery’s accompanying text is as follows…

CIPR TV on ethics

Sun, 20 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This week’s CIPR TV addressed the topic of ethics, and ‘spin’. Joining me in the studio were Eliane Glaser, Guardian columnist and author of Get Real: How to tell it like it is in a world of illusions (Amazon , Waterstones ), and Dr Jon White, PR consultant, strategist, and author of the CIPR’s PR2020 report (PDF) .

It appears the world of public relations has a reputation problem. It’s almost schizophrenic, with one camp entrenched in persuasive ‘spin’, or perhaps publicity, and the other in working towards open, transparent, mutual understanding between the organisation and stakeholders. Max Clifford for example, whilst often introduced by the British mass media as a PR consultant, is actually a publicist; a distinction indeed that the Wikipedia community is able to make at the time of writing.

Reputation and Wikipedia, part II

Mon, 14 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The public relations profession and Wikipedia community have not enjoyed a productive relationship to date; antagonistic may be a more accurate adjective. For a quick overview of this situation, do take a look at my January 6th post, Reputation and Wikipedia .

For my part, I think I understand both parties’ points of view and see no reason why good public relations practice (the planned and sustained effort to influence opinion and behaviour, and to be influenced similarly, in order to build mutual understanding and goodwill) shouldn’t be employed to build bridges here.

CREWE

The Facebook group, Corporate Representatives for Ethical Wikipedia Engagement , has quite rightly stirred the pot, raising the profile of the issues involved. For those who practice public relations according to the definition in brackets above, Wikipedia can appear a frustrating community to work with. One asks: “Why, if I know facts on Wikipedia entries relating to my organisation / client are incorrect, can’t I jump in and correct them?” There are two answers to that, but firstly an update on that process of building bridges.

CIPR Guidance

PR Week’s Editor in Chief, Danny Rogers, called on the CIPR to clarify its guidance to members, and the profession more widely, on 18th January 2012 ("CIPR must set bar high on Wikipedia code "). Fortunately, the CIPR Social Media panel had already got its heads together to review the situation.

Finally, Google adds social analytics to GA

Tue, 01 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Back in 2009, at that year’s Monitoring Social Media conference, I forecast Google’s entry into social analytics in Q1 2010 . Whoops. Only fools do short-term forecasting. Wiser men look further out, by which time people have forgotten the prediction!

So here we are in Q2 2012 and the news from Google has dropped into my inbox. Verbatim:

Daily Telegraph article picked apart by Friends of the Earth in an advert in the FT

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I posted “‘Earned media’ is not a synonym for public relations ” late last night. One of the points I made in the post is that a PR campaign may well involve advertising, as odd as the application of the misguided Paid Owned Earned media taxonomy may make people think this might be.

And then I stumbled across this beautiful ad by the Friends of the Earth in the Financial Times today, literally identifying elements of a Daily Telegraph article they consider to be flawed or indeed down right incorrect. I would classify this as an attempt by Friends of the Earth to achieve mutual understanding with stakeholders; as public relations.

'Earned media' is not a synonym for public relations

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

“Categorising media as Paid, Owned and Earned isn’t particularly useful. In fact, it simply appears to reinforce increasingly irrelevant functional silos.”

That’s how I opened a blog post back in November, The Influence View of Content , and three incidents over the last couple of weeks have redoubled my determination to cut this crap.

Names have been changed…

Incident 1

Anne: “So our marketing team looks after the website, the blog and Facebook. And PR is obviously earned media – the traditional media relations, blogger relations and the like. They cover Twitter too, at least most of the time.”

Me: “So if we’re looking at things like that, let me ask where the concept of shared media takes us… the owned stuff that has earned a share – a ‘Like’, a RT, a +1 for example.”

Future Vistas for SEO

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

http://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed _code/12522700

The Brighton SEO conference is, I believe, the largest of its kind in the UK. We’re expecting over 1,000 delegates today. I’m up immediately after the “Ask the engines” panel featuring representatives from both Google and Bing, and you can peruse my stack above on where I think the third decade of the web’s development might take today’s SEO practitioners.

The Business of Influence for REALLY BIG Digital Impact

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s my slidestack for PRSA Digital Impact Conference (#PRSADiConf) today.

I hope it goes without saying that I’m happy to answer any questions this stack or my presentation today may raise, or just have a chat in general. Always my pleasure. My contact details are always easy to find on philipsheldrake.com.

Thanks of course to the PRSA team for the opportunity.

PRSA Digital Impact Conference April 2012

The REALLY BIG Digital Impact, at #PRSADiConf

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I’m in New York today at the PRSA’s Digital Impact Conference . In fact, I get the opportunity to present at 2.30pm this afternoon, and I’m really looking forward to it.

And the more I think about the conference title, Digital Impact, the more I’ve come to recognise that my presentation has two main thrusts…

First, most organisations don’t yet feel the digital impact of 2012 fully. They haven’t yet wholly adapted to today’s social media and digital technologies.

Persuasion

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Aristotle said that the three most powerful tools of persuasion are: ethos, argument by character; logos, argument by logic; and pathos, appeal to the emotions.

Because I have the superior mind of a scientist (that’s sarcasm btw), I have an overwhelming natural inclination toward logos. And when it doesn’t work, I try it again, despite Einstein’s insistence that doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is the very definition of insanity.

Trundling my way to the office on the number 94 Wednesday I read “Jay Heinrich’s Powers of Persuasion” in Business Week magazine in which Mr. Heinrich is described as one of the world’s leading students of Aristotelian rhetoric. This means he’s kinda expert at mixing up the ethos, logos and pathos just right.

When is a mobile a tablet? And more useful questions.

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

[Written originally for the CIPR Friday Roundup .]

“When is a mobile a tablet?” was the high level strategic question (that’s sarcasm) that I was debating with our CIPR TV guests this week the minute before we went live.

We decided the answer is subjective. It’s a tablet at the point you think you look stupid holding it to your ear. (Actually that’s not verbatim. We used a more descriptive word than stupid.)

Fortunately, the show itself addresses more important matters. For me, the most important morsel emerged during the conversation about apps, in particular the idea that today’s obsession with apps is just a moment in time.

CIPR TV – Mobile trends, tools and practices

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

If you’re in marketing or public relations you need to ‘get’ mobile. Period. So I was chuffed to be able to host a conversation on CIPR TV yesterday with Simon Liss , Managing Director of We Love Mobile , and David Murphy , Editor of Mobile Marketing Magazine .

Thanks Simon. Thanks David.

For information about upcoming CIPR TV shows, simply skip on over to www.cipr.tv .

PRSA, defining PR

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

[Originally written for the CIPR Friday Roundup .]

“Public relations is a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics.”

And so concludes the PRSA’s Public Relations Defined (#prdefined) initiative. Launched 30th October last year, the initiative has garnered considerable interest, both positive and negative.

On the positive front, I have seen considerable interest from practitioners, predominantly but not exclusively in the US as one might expect given the PRSA’s geographic domain, grappling with the question of how to define what they do for a living with sincerity. No bad thing, particularly when some practitioners’ perspective turns out to be, well, a little far off the mark.

The complexity of influence is a challenge – and an opportunity

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

[Originally written for The Guardian Media Network .]

If media is interesting because it facilitates communication, whether that communication is mediated or disintermediated, then communication is most interesting when it facilitates influence.

You have been influenced when you think something you wouldn’t otherwise have thought, or do something you wouldn’t otherwise have done. Simple as, although you wouldn’t think it now that influence is the hot word.

The capacity to change hearts, minds and deeds is considered the mark of the great communicator, the compelling personality, the charismatic politician, and ultimately no one wants to communicate without influence; that wouldn’t be a good use of the communicator’s time and energy, or indeed that of those on the receiving end.

The focus on making sure you’re influenced back is vital too. Individuals (and organisations) that best absorb the zeitgeist are heuristically more able to respond in ways their audiences (stakeholders) might well appreciate.

Influence is complex, and I mean that in the full “complexity science” sense of the word. Complexity is the phenomena that emerge from a collection of interacting objects. The interacting objects could be molecules of air and the phenomenon the weather. It could be vehicles and the phenomenon the traffic.

Social Media Week – something missing

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

[Originally written for the CIPR Friday Roundup .]

This week has been Social Media Week with events taking place in over twenty cities around the world. No-one can hope to take it all in, but I’ve done my best to keep abreast of the themes, big and small.

But there was one thing I was keenly looking out for yet did not see. If you did, please let me know. Machined media – or at least that’s my term for it.

I define machined media as content that’s automatically discovered, presented and published by machines for humans, and I introduced it at last year’s CIPR Social Media conference.

Machined media has had a fairly ignominious start in life. Anyone online will have stumbled across it. You will have seen some weird looking text in spam emails, and spam websites just looking for any and all traffic they can entice a search engine to send their way. The text has been generated automatically to try to by-pass spam filters, and then to encourage you to click so the spammers make money. The content hasn’t had to aspire to Shakespearean fluency because one click in a million will do just fine thank you very much.

But semi-machined media has entered prime time, and pure machined media is on the cusp.

UK businesses will have to pay a UK media license – Copyright Tribunal implications

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Yes, you read the title to this post right. Are you in business? In the UK? Online or use email? Then you apparently owe the Newspaper Licensing Agency some money.

I first expressed my interest in an increasingly aggressive Newspaper Licensing Agency in a 2007 blog post suggesting a more appropriate title for the body – Newspaper Licensing Anachronism. Please note that I have nothing against the monetization of copyright content (hey I’m an author!), I just think the way the NLA conducts its business is all rather 20th Century. And this week, we’ve had a Copyright Tribunal Interim Decision . [The square brackets below reference this decision.]

The NLA’s relevance in the 21st Century has been tested, as far as the law is open to interpretation, by the innovative media monitoring company, Meltwater . Actually, the description the Copyright Tribunal uses to describe Meltwater, or rather Meltwater’s witness, is “unnecessarily combative” [35]. Well, talking of combat, the latest battle in this war concluded yesterday.

The result is a mixed affair, with neither the NLA or Meltwater coming out on top. I’ve just recorded an interesting conversation with Meltwater’s JP Glittenberg about this week’s decision… do take a listen, particularly if you work in media, PR or copyright.

[audio:https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Meltwater-interview-15Feb2012.mp3|titles=Meltwater interview 15th Feb 2012]

Now the Tribunal is quite restricted: by law; by precedent; by previous adjudgements in this ongoing case; by its own terms of reference. Generally, on reading the entire 60-page decision, I find the Tribunal to be most diligent, but given my background, I get a bit uptight every time I read something that indicates a lack of technical understanding of the Internet and the World Wide Web (yes, they are different things!)

Despite some stumbles however, they get somewhere interesting in the end. In fact, they end up showing up UK copyright law for the shambles it is.

The PR agency is dead. Long live the PR consultancy.

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

[Originally written for the CIPR Friday Roundup .]

I delivered the inaugural CIPR Strategic Management Series presentation this week on the Influence Scorecard . We explored the future developments of social media, related information technologies and business strategy development and execution, all three of which are massively transformed in the past decade and a half, and continue to change rapidly.

And we discussed what’s encompassed exactly by the increasingly heard phrase, “socializing the enterprise”.

The following question, asked during the Q&A part of the evening, is perfectly formed to offer up a slice through the future as I see it: “What does all this mean for PR agencies?”. Let’s set the scene…

Social media measurement – AMEC's 'Big Ask' European consultation

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The PR industry view and ‘Big Ask’ - Philip Sheldrake , uploaded by Gorkana Group on Vimeo .

AMEC – the international Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication – launched its social measurement consultation exercise with European members and in-house and agency PR professionals on November 17th 2011 at the ‘Big Ask’ conference. I spoke at the conference and the videos of the day have just been posted to Vimeo. In the egocentric nature that is personal blogging, I’ve embedded the video of me above, and videos of the other speakers can all be found here .

Reputation and Wikipedia

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

[Originally written for the CIPR Friday Roundup ]

What does the Wikipedia entry for your organisation / client / brand say? What about brand references in other entries? All cosy on the Wikipedia front? And recognising that a neutral point of view (NPOV) is one of Wikipedia’s “five pillars” , you have resisted editing anything where your neutrality is questionable. Right?

Let’s face it, Wikipedia is amazing. I had the pleasure of attending the Wikipedia 10th birthday party in London last year and I wasn’t the only one there who admitted to not appreciating Wikipedia’s potential back in the day. Seriously? A website anyone can edit?! Yeah right, that’ll work. Not.

And yet today Alexa ranks Wikipedia the sixth most popular site on the web. Search for a company or brand in Google or Bing and there’s the Wikipedia entry tempting you with its neutrality, familiarity and ease of use. The Wikipedia community plays a significant role in brand reputation.

This week, one of my favourite Conversation contributors, Stuart Bruce, spotted Member of Parliament Tom Watson’s interest in Wikipedia and PR practice . He found Watson’s contribution, Wednesday, to a Wikipedia talk page:

CIPR TV with Howard Kosky on Broadcast PR and with Dr. Jon White on PR 2020, the future of PR

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

CIPR TV goes from strength to strength. As part of the hosting team, I had the pleasure this week to host an extended show – sort of a two-for-one.

CIPR TV is only possible courtesy of the team at Markettiers4dc , and it was about time we invited Howard Kosky, Markettiers4dc founder and chairman, on the show. Howard walks us through how the broadcast landscape has transformed over the past decade and a half, and gives viewers some tips for the top and pitfalls to avoid. In fact, when you consider the role broadcast plays in the public relations mix, I can’t believe we haven’t addressed the topic before!

Public Relations, today and by 2020

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I’m typing this post sitting on the front row at the CIPR’s PR 2020 event at Russell Square HQ. To my left, Stephen Waddington . To my right, Julio Romo . On stage we have CIPR CEO, Jane Wilson , Dr. Jon White , and ComRes Marketing Manager, Simon Thwaites.

ComRes annual survey

ComRes conducts an annual review of key market stats for the UK PR industry, and Simon is running through that right now. Interestingly, in light of the PRSA’s current Defining PR initiative, which the CIPR supports, only 44% of ComRes poll respondents agreed with the statement “My friends and family understand what I do for a living.”

Why the meaning of PR shouldn't be left to circumstance

Sat, 26 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This post specifically responds to a post by Eric Bryant , Director of Gnosis Arts , “an experience-driven public relations firm focusing on tech, social media & nonprofit PR” in the US. In the post, Eric addresses the PRSA’s Defining PR initiative (see my last two blog posts) and asserts that the definition of anything is simply a function of how the term is used.

He writes:

“We chose this definition because we think it expresses what is both essential to public relations practice, as well as what distinguishes it from other management functions. Our definition also takes into account what most PRs do, most of the time, in carrying out their job duties.”

And his company’s definition is:

“Public relations is the practice of producing publicity (excluding promotional materials and paid advertising, which typically fall under the purview of Marketing); managing media relations and communications (typically among members of the Fourth Estate); and managing reputation.”

First up, let me thank Eric for tweet-alerting me to his post. I particularly appreciate his diligent explanation of the definition, too often omitted by the more slapdash.

His firm’s definition melds two ‘what’s and one ‘why’, reputation, justifying it on the basis of Wittgenstein’s notion of “meaning as use” (ie, definitions are lent simply by the way a word or phrase is commonly used). While Wittgenstein’s approach to language has its advocates, I’m not entirely clear it’s helpful here, for two reasons.

Public Relations Defined – the anatomy of a candidate definition, ver 0.2

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

[Written for the CIPR Friday Roundup]

Following the momentum the PRSA’s #prdefined initiative is achieving, and the CIPR’s statement of support , I thought I’d take a deeper dive into current definitions, and throw one in the mix myself.

I reproduced the section of my book that addresses the definitions of marketing and PR in my last post , and since then I’ve been able to have some insightful conversations, on- and off-line, with Jay O’Connor, Jon White, David Phillips and Terry Flynn.

Is it worth it?

There has been some valid criticism of the PRSA initiative pivoting around the question: shouldn’t we invest time and energy in improving practice to live up to current definitions than review those definitions we already have? The counter to this argument is apparent for those tracking the thousands of comments on line; it appears that more than a few practitioners indirectly criticised by those holding this point of view are actually questioning their own appreciation of public relations, if not actively revising it.

CIPR definition

PR is the discipline that looks after reputation, with the aim of earning understanding and support and influencing opinion and behaviour. It is the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organization and its publics.

My favourite definition, no word of a lie! I obviously love the reference to influence, but also the apparently unique and skilful avoidance (intended or otherwise) of communication, thereby emphasising the objective not the means. But when ‘reality is perception’, as is increasingly the case with the radical transparency lent by social media, reputation is built by everything an organisation does (or indeed does not do), not just what the PR team does; every one must be involved in “looking after” reputation.

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

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

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?

The Influence View of Content – seeking something more useful than 'paid, owned, earned'

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

[Version 0.1 « work in progress needing your critical feedback. Also available as a PDF if that suits you better.]

Précis

Categorising media as Paid, Owned and Earned isn’t particularly useful. In fact, it simply appears to reinforce increasingly irrelevant functional silos.

The Influence View of Content aims to establish something more useful. It’s a perspective that seeks to help influence professionals think about how influence goes around and comes around in line with the Influence Scorecard framework .

Definition: Influence – you have been influenced when you think something you wouldn’t otherwise have thought or do something you wouldn’t otherwise have done.

Definition: The Influence Scorecard – serves as both the methodology for defining influence strategy and the tool for executing it.

Paid Owned Earned

With the proliferation of what used to be known as “new media”, it was natural to attempt some sort of descriptive taxonomy:

Your vital role in the economic recovery

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

[Written for the CIPR Friday Roundup]

There will be an economic recovery and best practice public relations will play its part.

Economists may not agree on the how, but they are agreed on the what – we need economic growth. And economic growth comes from organisations that are more productive, and productivity is partly driven by improving mutual understanding between the organisation and its stakeholders – ie, the excellence model of PR.

An organisation that better understands all stakeholders will be more sensitive to its market and more agile and appropriate in its response.

Last week, the UK government announced an initiative with twenty six major organisations “working together to deliver a new era of consumer empowerment”. The programme, midata, “will give consumers increasing access to their personal data in a portable, electronic format.”

This is a world first as far as I know, although the prospect has been discussed for several years. It’s often referred to as vendor relationship management (VRM), the other side of the CRM coin if you like.

Will your organisation join this revolution in customer data? Will you play your part in the economic recovery?

Best regards, Philip and The Conversation team.

The CIPR Presidential Debate

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I had the honour and pleasure of hosting the Presidential Debate on CIPR TV yesterday – the annual show giving the Presidential candidates the opportunity to set out their stall, and for members to ask them questions live via Twitter and the CIPR web form.

You can watch the video here and you’ll find the candidates’ election statements on the CIPR website .

Voting for the President-Elect 2012 / President 2013 closes midday Friday 18th November.

The UK takes a step closer to Streams Banks – your personal data nirvana

Sun, 06 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

A year ago, to the week, I was writing Chapter 8 of The Business of Influence about the future trends each and every influence professional would have to grasp. In particular, I wrote:

I consider the data and information I create directly or indirectly through my use of products and services to be private and mine by default. I may choose to make any part of it accessible to specified others and maintain my ownership, or relinquish some ownership rights, or all rights.

Should I consider entering a contract with the purchase of a product or service that entails some variation to this default – perhaps simply because delivery of the product or service is meaningless without such variation – the nature of this variation must be made explicitly clear to me in plain language, and it is then my choice whether or not to agree to those terms, which may entail my negotiating different terms or choosing not to buy that specific product or service.

To me, a future where so much data is collected about me and owned by others is nothing short of dystopia. Of course, the situation I describe above is far from where we find ourselves today and I make the case that influence professionals should be helping to lead the charge toward empowering the customer – past, present and future. As such, the chapter continues to lay out a potential privacy framework, introducing Streams Banks:

It’s the moniker I’ve given the service with the primary purpose of collecting all your digital detritus, all your so-called life streams of data, in one place on your behalf and giving you the power to analyse and visualize it all.

A streams bank archives the minutiae of your life, if you so wish. The service may offer suggestions or advice in decision-making, and perhaps it may even be relied upon to make certain decisions for you autonomously.

What on Earth could catalyse this transformation?..

Imagine that you’re a mobile telephone network operator. Right now, you own the data describing the customer’s use of your network. What competitive advantage might be had by reversing that situation, by transferring ownership to the customer – on the condition of service of course that you can have access to their data in order to determine billing and associated aspects of your service provision? And what if you gave the customer the tools to learn about her data, to download it and share it with whomever she wished. What might she learn about herself and her family? How might this data be mashed up? How much easier would it be to source the perfect tariff for the next year given the opportunity to share last year’s data? If you think that sounds bad for business you’re effectively saying that opacity is good. History has shown that walled gardens and other protective practices eventually crumble in competitive telephony markets.

Well, it seems this day is dawning.

What our publics are telling us

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

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.

ESOMAR 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?

ESOMAR 3D Presentation – The Business of Influence

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I’m in Miami today at the ESOMAR 3D Digital Dimensions conference. For those of you unfamiliar with ESOMAR, it’s “the essential organisation for encouraging, advancing and elevating market research worldwide. With more than 4,800 members from over 120 countries, ESOMAR’s aim is to promote the value of market and opinion research in illuminating real issues and bringing about effective decision-making.”

The Business of Influence – ESOMAR 3D Digital Dimensions Conference 2011

Measuring Online – CIPR Freshly Squeezed training session

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

An interesting start to the day today… over to CIPR HQ in Russell Square to deliver a training course on social measurement in the Freshly Squeezed series.

I had just 45 minutes with 15 minutes Q&A, and this time constraint combined with the state of best practice in the profession meant I was aiming simply to leave attendees knowing the right questions if not the right answers per se. After all, as the slidestack below teases out, if your organisation, marketplace, stakeholders, marketing and PR objectives, marketing and PR strategy and execution are unique, it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that your metrics will be unique too.

Interview with Carla Buzasi, Editor-in-Chief, Huffington Post UK

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I recently interviewed Carla Buzasi about her relatively new role as Editor-in-Chief of the Huffington Post UK . The interview went out as the middle part of October’s three-part CIPR TV episode, and the video below is set up to go straight to the interview. To watch the whole episode, simply skip back to the start using the YouTube player controls.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqznzVgyY3Q&t=22m32s

The Role of PR in a Digital Age

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

European PR Congress 2011 – The Role of PR in the Digital Age

View more presentations from Philip Sheldrake .

I’m in Kiev this evening preparing my presentation for tomorrow’s European PR Congress 2011. I’m the first session of the day so I have the challenge of exciting the delegates, with getting some energy in the room. I was fascinated by the enthusiasm from the audience when I presented last month in San Francisco, so it’ll be interesting to compare the two.

Now, I was briefed by event organiser Marina Starodubska (General Director, Partner, Mikhailov&Partners.Ukraine ) that social media in Ukraine has not yet gained the momentum it has in Europe and the USA for example. She estimates that household broadband Internet penetration is just 26% [updated following the first comment below]. Interestingly, however, according to Total Telecom in July last year : “Ukraine as a whole had 55.60 million mobile subscriptions… putting penetration at 121.2%.”

Whilst I haven’t been able to find a breakdown of feature phones and smart phones, the waiting staff in the restaurant this evening indicated that such devices are booming. In the car to the hotel I also noticed that Nokia is investing in quite a big outdoor advertising campaign here for its feature and smart phones.

My stack for tomorrow is included here. The majority of the slides are taken from the longer stack from last month’s Dreamforce , so if you took a look at that, you might not want to take the time here. But it’s more the narrative I intend to tailor for this event. The emphasis tomorrow is simple – Public Relations, as defined by the Excellence Study, has a very bright future.

Communication Director Magazine book review – The Business of Influence

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

My 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.

Social Media Analytics

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Are you savvy when it comes to social analytics? If you’re a PR practitioner, the answer to this question must be YES.

Marshall Sponder visited London last week as part of his tour promoting his new book, Social Media Analytics – Effective Tools for Building, Interpreting, and Using Metrics (ISBN 978-0-07-176829-0). Having read a draft manuscript of the book, a quote of mine appears on the front cover: “Ignoring this book is akin to ignoring your market.”

There is no better independent authority on the tools and techniques than Marshall. Whilst some pundits simply maintain lists of social analytics vendors with some basic feature comparison tables, Marshall has actually used many of them for real. Moreover, he has a peculiar ability to prod the vendors and the engineers that build these services, to get under the hood and separate the actual capabilities from the marketing claims.

Marshall is not, however, a public relations practitioner or management consultant. This book does not provide a strategic framework for the integration of social analytics into your organisation. It does not address important issues such as privacy (of customers, employees and the wider public) or ethics. It doesn’t attempt to define a detailed taxonomy of the analytics services out there, or make this a comprehensive market review.

How many Tweets make a Like?

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

If you’re looking for an acid test as to whether an organisation is centred in this social world, as to whether they have a marketing and communications strategy that integrates social media cogently and coherently rather than bolts it on, listen out for questions like this:

How much is a tweet / retweet / follower / friend / like / +1 / comment / whatevermetickle worth?

If this is the kind of question they’re asking then, in my opinion, they simply don’t yet ‘get it’. If you’re feeling particularly wicked, take your pick of one of these to respond to their question and see if they take you seriously:

$0.23 per hundred
A ’like’ is definitely worth somewhere between 2 and 3 tweets; sort of around 2.42
A comment has an engagement quotient nine times that of a ‘friend’
If you’re in tech, then a +1 is currently five times more potent than a RT, but the reverse is true for other markets
That depends if you’re B2B or B2C
Well, can I ask, is there any yellow in your logo?

In The Business of Influence (Chapter 5) I include the following table, titled “Maturity of influence approach”.

Click and type or touch and swipe

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Post written for the CIPR Conversation Friday Roundup:

Regular readers will know I’ve argued for some time that we’ve really past the point where we can talk about digital media as if it’s the exception. The majority media is now digital, or has a digital component via something like a QR code , image recognition and augmented reality. If anything, we should be calling out analogue media in its minority role by now.

And yet in 2011 it’s probably still pertinent to make the distinction between ‘being online’ versus ‘offline’. Sure, your smartphone is always on; and sure, it always knows where it is and reports that data back real-time to all those app vendors that demand this data (even if it’s just to allow you to chuck an angry bird around the screen). But you’ll find yourself hard pressed to find someone who considers themselves to be actively online 24/7.

However, this is changing. And fast. In just a few short years we’re well down the line in moving from so-called ‘click and type’ interfaces to ’touch and swipe’. Think about someone just like you living a century ago… the actions of clicking and typing would have been alien to them, yet touching and swiping are quite natural.

Socializing the enterprise. Are you?

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

[Post written for the CIPR Conversation Friday Roundup]

I adopt the US spelling of socialize here because I’m doing the roundup this week from San Francisco where I’m attending the Dreamforce conference, a conference dedicated to this very theme.

Dreamforce is the annual Salesforce.com conference and with 45,000 registered delegates this year it is now, or so CEO Marc Benioff assures us, the largest corporate tech event of its kind. There is a palpable enthusiasm for the theme, regularly articulated as “awesome” by the American delegates.

[Disclosure: Salesforce.com is paying me to be here.]

Salesforce.com advocates a three-step approach to socializing the enterprise, in no particular order:

Influence: Socializing the Enterprise – my presentation at Dreamforce 2011

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Salesforce.com’s CEO Marc Benioff is excited that there are 45,000 delegates registed for this week’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. It sure is one helluva a show (and I particularly appreciated the Metallica and Will.i.am gig last night!)

The theme for this year’s conference is the socialization of the enterprise and the reason for my invitation to present to the Executive Summit yesterday and delegates at large today. [Disclosure: Salesforce.com is paying me to be here.]

Dreamforce 2011 presentation – Sheldrake

View more presentations from Philip Sheldrake

There can be no doubt that Salesforce.com is on a mission to help its customers make the social transition with as much emphasis placed on increasing the social exchange with employees and partners as customers and prospects, and this mission entailed the acquisition of Radian6 earlier this year.

When I spoke at the Radian6 Social2011 conference in April, I felt the excitement at the opportunity to meld the Radian6 and Salesforce.com worlds, but I hadn’t appreciated how fast this integration would take place. Simply gobsmacking.

The Twitter / Blackberry / Facebook Riots

Fri, 12 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The hot topic of the week has been covered extensively on The Conversation and the mainstream media… the English riots. This Roundup aims to reconcile two polarised camps debating the role of social and mobile media.

First up, a statement from the Prime Minister in the House of Commons yesterday: “… we are working with the police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality.” Conversationalist Mark Pack asks whether it is simply a question of politicians and pundits always trying to ban technologies they don’t use .

I think the question has been poorly phrased when it takes the form… Were these riots caused by Twitter / Blackberry messenger / Facebook? No of course they weren’t. Riots long preceded the rise of such media. But what if the question was rephrased… How was the character of these riots altered by the availability of such media?

The primary message coming out of The Conversation this week (see below) is that you can’t blame social media or society’s enthusiastic adoption of it. Yet this belies or at least underplays its influence in my opinion. I would never resort to such tabloid misrepresentation as when the Daily Mail labels one photograph of a London bus ablaze “Twitter riot” , but equally it appears that mobile and social media were prominent over other media and forms of communication in organising the riots.

Don't forward. That could be illegal.

Sat, 30 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s how The Independent reports on this week’s Appeal Court decision to uphold the High Court’s decision that customers of media monitoring services – which provide digests of news from websites run by newspapers – need licences from the publications involved, in order to avoid breaching their copyright.

And as much as this might surprise anyone who thought they knew that the Web is made up of web pages with unique addresses that anyone can forward, share, bookmark, embed and access – I’m afraid you’re wrong. In fact, I may have broken UK law by including the link to The Independent article without having bought a license from the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA ).

[Note to non-UK resident readers: This situation is acutely embarrassing for us Brits and I’d appreciate it if you kept this quiet. After all, our current coalition government really wants the rest of the world to think we ‘get’ digital.]

You see the trouble is the Court’s are dealing with horse and cart in the age of the automobile. The government commissioned May 2011 review of the state of UK intellectual property law, the Hargreave’s report , concludes that laws designed more than three centuries ago with the express purpose of creating economic incentives for innovation by protecting creators’ rights are today obstructing innovation and economic growth. An unequivocal conclusion if ever there was one.

Meanwhile in Mumbai

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The Meanwhile team decamped to Mombai (aka Bombay) this week to find out what’s happening in the ‘I’ in BRIC – one of the fastest growing markets in the world. With a population of 20 million in a country of 1.2 billion and 771 million mobile phone subscriptions , no visitor to Mumbai is left in doubt that there’s an energy and urgency about the place, even if the traffic ends up being very far from fast as a result. (Seriously, the 3km between hotel and airport mid-morning took 30 minutes.)

The Indian economy

The OECD’s June 2011 review of India identifies adult literacy of 74% and a GDP per head US$1068 (equivalent to US$3296 of purchasing power parity). The review starts with this assessment:

Santander UK Chief Executive Ana Botín gets a free copy of The Business of Influence

Sat, 09 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000

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In an endeavour to improve customer satisfaction, Santander UK Chief Executive Ana Botín has taken the decision this week to bring call centres back from India to the UK.

Actually, “to improve customer service” is possibly looking at the situation glass half full when perhaps it’s actually half empty. More accurately, the move appears primarily motivated by a desire to reduce customer dissatisfaction.

Call centres were offshored in 2003 (when the banking operation was known as Abbey – acquired by Santander Group in 2004).

Interestingly, the FT reports that Santander UK’s move follows a diktat by the UK’s Financial Services Authority that banks publish complaint numbers for the first time in 2010, making Santander more visibly the most complained-about bank for the first half of the year, and second only to Barclays during the second half.

Guilty – The CIPR Friday Roundup

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000

We have a fundamental tenet in our Western societies – innocent until proven guilty. The problem we have now is simply that reputation pivots faster via the social Web than can be adjudged in the courtroom.

I have no idea whatsoever whether Dominique Strauss-Kahn did or did not rape or sexually molest the hotel maid. But he has already lost his job heading up the International Monetary Fund. His chances to run for senior government office are dashed. If he’s found guilty, then you might say all’s well and good, but he is currently innocent until proven guilty, and may never be found guilty. Charges may even be dropped. Where’s the “all’s well and good” in that?

This trend is significant for reputation management – of organisations as well as individuals.

And yet given the radical and real-time transparency of the social Web, I’ve been saying recently that ‘reality is perception’. I posit that this is a more relevant axiom today than the one that dominated the 20th Century, ‘perception is reality’. Am I not, therefore, contradicted here?

Social media measurement and the Influence Scorecard – HWZ Social Media Conference

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve just arrived in Zurich at HWZ (Zurich University of Applied Sciences in Business Administration) for today’s Social Media Conference. I’m delighted to be keynoting at 1.30pm, and here’s my presentation.

I know… it’s a bit text heavy in parts. @gabbicahane has already pointed that out to me. I protested that for a slidestack to make sense to those people who are interested but who cannot make the conference, it needs to have more context than some beautiful pictures and seven words per slide.

How data is transforming digital marketing

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Digital marketing has come a long way in the past decade, as we’ve moved beyond putting existing materials online and learned how to really harness the native advantages of digital technologies.

The pace of change continues unabated, and among its most important drivers is data – and the meaning of that data.

Every one of us is going to be producing more data describing our use of digital products and services. This is what I like to call digital detritus. Detritus – discarded organic matter which is decomposed by microorganisms and reappropriated by animal and plant life – is interestingly analogous to our regard for, and treatment of, the data that we’re all shedding.

Big data

When it comes to the increase in data, we’re working on a logarithmic scale: we’re talking about hundreds and thousands of times more. Data in such quantities may well prove to have important new mathematical properties that are attractive to marketers, customer service and product development teams. Moreover, we don’t actually do much with the digital detritus today – it mostly resides in inaccessible log files, although the technology for collating it is becoming increasingly achievable and affordable.

What does this mean in everyday terms?

An invitation from Global Dawn

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The very nice people at Global Dawn invited me in a couple of weeks back to meet the team and speak about some of the stuff covered in The Business of Influence . They were particularly drawn to the aspects of measurement / ROI / business performance management, and the convergence of the traditional influence-related silos come to that.

I was videoed as the inaugural session of The Global Dawn Influencer Series.

Profiting from the New Web – the video

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I posted about the Profiting from the New Web conference last month, and now the video summary of the day has been published. It was a real pleasure to chair the event and have the opportunity to provide some commentary in the video too.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to get in touch after the conference. I’m sure, given the overwhelming positive sentiment, that we’ll be making this conference into a series. Watch this space.

BT's social failure drives customers away

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

You’ll know that consumer facing organisations are investing shed loads in social media. Right? But how intelligent is this investment? Are they even getting the basics right?

Thinking or just acting?

This is the number one differentiator in my book between the success stories and the also-rans. There are those who truly ’think’ social. They have reviewed operations from the ground up in light of the age of social media. Every aspect of business is reviewed systematically through the lens of social media, and strategy is developed on this basis. And whilst they are to be celebrated, this post is about one company that has visibly #failed in my eyes in recent weeks.

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BT is the UK’s number 1 Internet Service Provider, yet a May 2011 upgrade to the firmware of its customers’ home routers left Linux users unable to connect to it.

And in case you didn’t know, Android, the world’s fastest growing operating system for Smartphones, is based on Linux. So BT does not currently provide me Internet service for my Android phone, leaving me and other customers in my position having to use the more expensive 3G data networks than home broadband. Disgraceful.

But this isn’t a blog about ISPs. This is a blog about social media and customer relationships and business performance. Enter BT’s support forum (at http://community.bt.com ).

The ROI of Public Relations – Friday Roundup

Fri, 17 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

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. Apart from that, it works just fine!

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.

Not PR – Friday Roundup

Fri, 03 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

“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.

Truth be told – Friday Roundup

Fri, 27 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000

According to the renowned Excellence study, public relations is a management function that focuses on two-way communication and fostering of mutually beneficial relationships between an organisation and its publics. One might argue that one can’t aim to please (benefit) everyone, so it might be more appropriate to emphasise mutual understanding rather than mutual benefit, as indeed the CIPR’s current definition of PR does.

Despite the common association of PR with spin (spin a yarn, make up a story), the PR professional focuses on symmetrical communication based on truths and understanding. Indeed, I like to say that whilst ‘perception is reality’ may have been a dominant axiom for 20th Century practice, the 21st Century professional acknowledges that changes to media, communications technology and societal expectations now renders ‘reality is perception’ more appropriate.

But what is truth?

The Web this decade and what it means for your organisation

Wed, 25 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a fortunate geek. I got to chair the 6UK launch back in November, with keynote by Vint Cerf – fondly referred to as one of the fathers of the Internet. And on Monday this week, I chaired Profiting From The New Web at the Royal Society with keynote by Sir Tim Berners-Lee – inventor of the World Wide Web. How cool is that?!

[caption id=“attachment_28121” align=“alignnone” width=“300” caption=“Sir Tim Berners-Lee, New Web, London, 23rd May 2011 (courtesy Intellect)”] [/caption]

I worked with the Web Science Trust and Intellect to design this week’s conference, and we set ourselves this mission:

Discover new and better ways to do business, run our countries, and lead fulfilling and sustainable lives via the intelligent, innovative and diligent development of the New Web, and to make progress faster than otherwise.

Web Innovation

The term Web 1.0 is applied retrospectively to a Web of documents and ecommerce. The term Web 2.0 has come to describe social community and user-generated content. The New Web – the Web of Data or the Semantic Web, and sometimes Web 3.0 – entails the Web itself understanding the meaning of that participation and content.

A component of the Web of Data, known as Open Data , encompasses the idea of freeing data so that others may query it, check and challenge it, augment it, and mash it up with other sources. Sir Tim is particularly motivated by this vision given its potential to drive scientific breakthrough, enhance delivery of public services and open up new frontiers for competitive advantage.

Neville Hobson's interview with me at the book launch party

Fri, 22 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

A big thank you to everyone who joined me last night in central London for the launch party for The Business of Influence . And for those who were still around between midnight and 2am, I can only say that I rarely get the opportunity to cut those dance moves these days; so apologies.

Special thanks to the legendary Neville Hobson (@jangles ) for taking the time to record a chat with me. For those who haven’t yet had the pleasure, Neville is a co-host of the FIR (For Immediate Release) podcast amongst many other things .

My book, The Business of Influence, is out today

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Today’s the day!

It’s ready for delivery in the UK today, and pre-order in other parts of the world. For those of you tweeting about availability in the US, currently listed as mid-June by some bookstores, Wiley tells me it should actually be with you mid-May. Thank you for your interest and patience.

What’s it about?

The Business of Influence is a rethink.

It’s about improving the capabilities of organisations to design and attend to the way in which all aspects of its operations influence stakeholders, about making sure stakeholders influence it, systematically, and about how well competitors are attempting the same. It focuses on influence as the common denominator of marketing and public relations and related activities such as customer service, sales, product development and HR, and therefore the basis for redesigning these and interconnecting them.

The book introduces the Influence Scorecard, named in homage to the dominant framework for business performance management, the Balanced Scorecard. The Influence Scorecard then is a subset or view of the Balanced Scorecard containing all the influence-related key performance indicators (KPIs) stripped of functional silo, and it may extend beyond the Balanced Scorecard should a greater operational granularity of metrics be demanded by the influence strategy.

The Influence Scorecard is a new framework for the 21st-century designed to help organisations focus on what matters rather than continue to carry the baggage and inefficiencies that come part and parcel of the typical 20th-century marketing and PR structure and approach. It’s a reframing in the context of 21st-century media and disintermediation, 21st-century technology, and 21st-century articulation of and appreciation for business strategy.

Taptu for iPad – with gorgeous illustration

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

With a spike in visitors to my blog exceeding 1000% of normal activity, the most popular post of all time on this blog is Content – an illustrated history . That obviously excludes the much greater exposure the illustration by Nic Hinton (@karoshikula ) and me will have garnered when Mashable and Wired ran with it, and I’ve since heard that the illustration is being used to teach university students and school kids, and for the purposes of social media training in organisations.

I mentioned in the updates to that post inserted during the ensuing days that Taptu CEO Mitch Lazar had become smitten with the illustration style and had expressed an interest in applying the style at Taptu in future. Well now they’ve done just that.

Today, the next generation of the popular and free social news reader comes out for iPhone and iPad (it’s already rocking and rolling on Android). Taptu calls it the social news DJ – allowing you to mix your favourite news streams. I’ve posted some of the illustrations used in the app here, but there’s nothing quite like checking the app out for yourself and seeing all of them in all their glory… particularly on the larger screen of the iPad. I’ve also posted a video of the new iPad version in action.

I consider an app like Taptu to be an indispensable tool in the PR professional’s armoury. Do you have a favourite social news reader?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkcMi3EuKew

Social analytics on CIPR TV – with Connie Bensen, Emily Dent and Marcel LeBrun

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Regular readers know that social analytics is a subject close to my heart. And would you believe it, my ebook on the matter, The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008, still gets downloaded a thousand times a month. I also made sure to include a section on social analytics in my book of course (out this month in the UK and shortly in the US), listing twelve primary characteristics of the services to assist in your organisation’s tool selection and procurement.

Radian6 and the Insights Platform – getting semantic

Thu, 07 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I’m in Boston this week for the Radian6 Social 2011 Conference. (Disclosure: Radian6 is paying my expenses to be here.) So far I’ve enjoyed talking with Radian6 CMO David Alston, OpenAmplify CEO Mark Redgrave, Edelman’s David Armano, Dell’s Head of Interactive Marketing Adam Brown, Klout Head of Platform Matthew Thomson, Marshall Sponder and Nathan Gilliatt.

Radian6 CEO Marcel LeBrun has kicked off the event this morning by launching the new Insights Platform , and I appreciate why Marcel is so enthusiastic about it.

Here’s how Radian6 describes it:

Insights are answers. Insights give meaning to unstructured volumes of content based your needs and integrated into our current dashboard offering. Current partners include Klout , OpenAmplify and OpenCalais . The insights that each of these partners offer (like age range, location, influencer score, textual analysis) are added as drill down options on the Dashboard widgets, so you are able to take your Radian6 topic profile mentions and overlay the insight partner data all in one place. No exporting River of News and doing comparative analysis in Excel to these providers data from your separate account, now it’s all been brought together for you.

How does it work? Well Radian6 has leaned heavily on the three partners, with both OpenAmplify and OpenCalais having deep expertise in semantic technologies. This is the tech that helps interpret, understand and process the meaning of content. Serious stuff.

The CIPR Conversation – a 1st

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The CIPR has just announced that it will be launching The Conversation this coming Monday, during its social media conference . The Conversation provides the facility to aggregate the best PR related blogs from members and non-members, in the UK and further afield. And it goes live under a full head of steam because The Conversation is the new face of MarCom Professional, the network I’ve been running for the past four years. Here’s what the CIPR has to say:

Groupon is bad for business – no April fool

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

According to BusinessWeek, Groupon could be the fastest growing business of all time – going from zero to rejecting a rumoured six billion dollar offer from Google two years later on the basis it seriously undervalued the company. It’s now eyeing up a twenty five billion dollar IPO. Not bad for a discount voucher business.

My sister-in-law recently bought a £300 spa package for £100 via Groupon. Haircut, massage, manicure and pedicure. She’s delighted.

“Would you go back to the spa?” I ask. “Definitely” she replies. And then came the qualifier, unprompted: “When they run another Groupon deal.”

In other words, the spa in question secured a transaction and eliminated themselves from building a mutually-valued relationship. My sister-in-law will now find it impossible to value the service in her mind at £300, or indeed much more than £100. And with Groupon taking 40-50% commission, it will have been a loss-making transaction at that (following standard accounting principles).

CIPR social media measurement guidance

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The AVE (advertising value equivalence) approach to PR measurement and evaluation was simple. And utterly wrong.

It’s a specious sum based on false assumptions using an unfounded multiplier and only addressing a fraction of the PR domain – a greater waste of time and effort you couldn’t hope to find.

Measurement and evaluation is essential, but requires real strategic understanding, diligence and perseverance. For me, it represents yet another distinction between the 21st Century PR professional and the 20th Century practitioner.

Money

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Let’s talk about money.

Michael Porter describes strategy as defining and attending to those activities at which an organisation must excel in order to create a sustainable difference in the marketplace, and thereby create sustained value for its shareholders (or sustainable value in the case of non-profits).

Once you’ve articulated why your organisation exists (the mission), and what you want it to be (the vision), the strategy describes the what, who, how, when and where needed to pursue the vision, and specifically how these differ from the competition. How these help beat your competition.

However, as hard as strategy formulation is, the really hard part is putting it into action. The Balanced Scorecard Institute finds that 70% of organisations with a strategy simply fail to execute it. And this becomes the more obvious the further away from the sale / the product / the service you get; the more you get into the intangible assets pivotal to your success.

Marketing and PR are intangible assets. They are intangible investments. We all know that the right mix of the panoply of marketing and PR activities is essential to organisational success – to the successful definition of organisational strategy and its execution – but too often we’re not quite sure how so. This is most apparent when, particularly in harder times, marketing and PR are considered cost centres first and foremost, and cost centres that can be cut.

What's the ROI of social media?

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I was delighted to have the opportunity to present my take on the ROI of social media to approximately 80 people yesterday evening at the Digital Publishing Forum . It seems this was a hot topic of interest; as well it should be.

I sought to put the topic into perspective with the following challenge. What’s the ROI?…

Of the latest rebrand?
Of the office refurb?
Of the internal communications activity?
Of the training and development programme?
Of the upgrade to Windows 7?
Of the new standard issue smartphones?
Of the stakeholder engagement via social media?

If you’d like to see where we went from there, here’s the presentation:

In conversation about the BP Deepwater crisis with Neil Chapman

Fri, 04 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Neil recently left BP after 14 years where his most recent role was in the unified command centre in the US, set up to respond to the Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Neil has more than 25 years’ managing public affairs issues and crises that have grabbed the headlines in different parts of the world, helping scores of executives to help them communicate more effectively in support of their businesses.

Influence in the age of the social web – keynote to EUPRERA

Fri, 04 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

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 :-)

Real-time PR demands rigorous strategic alignment

Mon, 28 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

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.

The Marketing Century – a compilation of expert insight

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

You 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.

Do Not Track

Fri, 18 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Today, I’m in Paris. I’m working with the Mozilla Europe team to prepare for the imminent launch of Firefox 4 and Firefox Mobile. And this prompts me to write here on the subject of privacy – a hot topic and one on which your organisation can lead, to your customers’ advantage and yours.

Mozilla is a global, non-profit organisation dedicated to making the Web better. It emphasises principle over profit, and believes that the Web is a shared public resource to be cared for, not a commodity to be sold.

This means that whilst Internet Explorer must justify its existence to Microsoft, Safari to Apple, and Chrome to Google, Firefox is only answerable to you. Many consider Mozilla to be the sole reason we’ve all moved on from the terrible browsing experience Internet Explorer 6 gave over 90% of Web users back in 2003. And now Firefox is the most popular browser in Europe.

Back to privacy. Do you know what information your browser is reporting about your browsing habits? Do you know that some high profile websites add as many as 100 tracking devices to your computer?

Now, lest you think this is some kind of hippy essay, I’m a capitalist. I believe the for-profit motive is the best mechanism we’ve found to date to improve life. But we’ve also seen in recent times that some free markets require a bit of intervention now and then; a spot of regulation. Indeed, a recent Business Week article identified how free-marketers are as fond of regulation as they are more widely reported to dislike it.

Meanwhile, a new approach to marketing and PR consultancy

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve teamed up with some very useful chaps to form Meanwhile . We’re defining venture marketing. Before I explain that further, I’ll elaborate on the main trends that make me think Meanwhile is precisely the right approach at the right time.

In short:

Previously distinct disciplines are converging
There is a renewed focus on measurement and evaluation of marketing and PR related programmes with boards demanding an unprecedented level of accountability
A new framework must emerge placing influence at the heart of business strategy.

Here’s how I present the situation in my upcoming book, The Business of Influence (Wiley, April 2011):

Hi, do you know Beeta Vahdat?

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I need your help.

My book, The Business of Influence, comes out with Wiley in April. That means the proofs go to press 24th February, and the URL to the book’s accompanying website will be writ therein. And what better URL could one have than thebusinessofinfluence.com?

The problem is, this domain is registered. According to a whois lookup, the name of the owner is Beeta Vahdat, a “principal of IMANI Communication Design” living in the Melbourne, Australia area. Ms. Vahdat does not appear to be using the domain name, so I’d like to see if I can buy it from her… if only I could get in touch.

Thank you

Fri, 04 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Just over two years ago I posted about a ’lost cat’ poster stapled to trees in my neighbourhood, but a poster with a difference… this was a ‘cat found’ poster saying thank you to everyone who had helped recover the treasured pet.

Sometimes in business it’s too easy to think that the value exchange, where I give you what you want in exchange for what I want, is the be all and end all… the customer has the product or service they were looking for, and we get money (or other currency, like attention).

But every business must strive for a relational rather than transactional customer, moving the focus from the once-off purchase to the lifetime value of the customer and the network of friends and family he / she might bring with them; so emotion comes into it, not just economic arithmetic.

Moreover, perhaps the transaction doesn’t complete. I always check my shed to make sure I haven’t locked the latest lost cat in there – and whilst I wasn’t directly responsible for returning the cat in question above, I was thanked anyway.

Do you say “thank you”? If you do, do you do so in a way that’s believable? Authentic? Or in a “have a nice day” automated sort of fashion that communicates no emotion whatsoever and just constitutes pollution?

I have a hypothesis that only those that are passionate about what they do and what they sell can find genuine feeling when conveying their thanks. And I look for this enthusiasm when considering my lifetime patronage of a cafe, bank, web host and, well, everything.

Thank you.

Thank you for your attention, to this Friday Roundup and the previous 160 or so!

Best regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.

Content - an illustrated history

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

UPDATE 1: Thank you to Wired , Mashable , @dmscott , @guykawaski and everyone else who has posted and shared our illustration :-)

UPDATE 2: Now available in Slideshare format .

UPDATE 3: Now available in for printing or anything else you fancy.

UPDATE 4: Now available in Spanish . Thanks to @FollowFlock & @rulsCC .

UPDATE 5: Taptu CEO Mitch Lazar loves our style (and the Taptu reference no doubt!) so we agreed earlier this week to apply our illustrative style to Taptu’s brand communications going forward. Cool.

UPDATE 6: The Slideshare format made the number 1 slot on Slideshare’s homepage for part of the day on the 27th Jan, and accrued over 4,000 views in 48 hours.

UPDATE 7: August 2011. Now available as a YouTube video. Don’t know why we didn’t think of it earlier! Embedded below.

No-one with a smattering of social Web literacy can fail to marvel at what’s taken place in recent history. The rate of change has been unprecedented.

Who would have thought thirty years ago that the Internet would go mainstream and the World Wide Web would transform content business models (and many other business models come to that) so radically?

Who would have thought twenty years ago that the average Joe would carry handheld devices as powerful as the Apple and Android devices?

Who would have thought ten years ago that consumers of media content could also, just as easily, be producers of media content?

Who would have thought five years ago that each and everyone of us could, with a stroke of a touch screen, design their own content channel and publish it.

The new governance of lobbying – in conversation with Elizabeth France and Keith Johnston

Fri, 21 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This week’s CIPR TV focused on the formation of the Public Affairs Council in response to the Public Administration Select Committee’s recommendations in its December 2008 report, Lobbying: Access and influence in Whitehall . We’re delighted that Elizabeth France, UKPAC’s chair, and Keith Johnston, CIPR and UKPAC board member, could join us to explain what’s going on, who it affects and how.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlL4w1i _4WA

A non-techie explanation of how web pages are secured

Sat, 15 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I first published this overview back in 2004. I’m prompted to update and repost it here because the original website is no longer live (it was the website for Fuse PR back in the day), because I was talking about it with some Meanwhile colleagues this week, and because it’s interesting. No seriously, it is.

When is a web page secure?

Content on a web page is secured when the URL starts “https://” rather than “http://”. Saying that, this doesn’t mean that all content on a page marked as such is secured, but if you’re on a website of a trusted source, like Amazon, you may be happy to assume that the parts that need to be are, by design.

If you’d like to find out what other information your browser gives you about the level of security for a particular web page, check out the relevant link here:

Social media measurement – easy once you recognise it's not

Thu, 13 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The CIPR ’s social media and measurement group is committed to providing updated guidance to members by the end of January. As the group’s chair, I’d better get my skates on. Here’s a quick look at the main thrust of our report.

Social media measurement, like business performance management and measurement in general, must measure what’s important to your organisation. Sounds simple for a moment doesn’t it, except that the view of what’s important and what’s trivial is pretty much muddied when it comes to marketing and PR measurement and evaluation in my experience.

Take the announcement this week from Sainsbury’s, one of the UK’s top supermarkets:

The 2011 Plan

Fri, 07 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Let’s talk strategy.

Without thorough strategy, one is resigned to contribute nothing to living up to your organisation’s mission and pursuing its vision. Thoroughly resigned. And the turn of the year is an apt time to take the strategic long view.

But let’s begin with the shortest view. David Meerman Scott’s latest book ‘Real-time Marketing and PR’ (book review ) emphasises that being attuned to the second by second deliberations, assertions and flippancy of the social Web is nothing short of imperative for many organisations. Nevertheless, he also points out that we need our approach to be informed by the organisation’s over-arching needs and guided by sound and consistent policy.

The title of a post by Brian Solis this week articulates the challenge succinctly, “failing to plan is planning to fail ” and Vanessa DiMauro also calls for proper diligence in her post, “not so fast! ”

So how do you know if you’re doing OK, or going hand to mouth? Why do too many of the leaders I work with consider they have this licked and yet discover otherwise?

Here’s an acid test. Grab a handful of colleagues in your marketing and PR teams this afternoon for fifteen minutes and ask the following four questions:

Book reviews, or what to give a marketing and PR professional for Christmas

Sun, 19 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

In a fast changing marketplace with fast changing technologies and consumer behaviours we have no option but to work hard keeping ourselves up to speed, week in week out. Time and money constraints rule out keeping abreast simply via course and event attendance, and the only real option is books.

Reading. Lots. Lots of books. Here’s a couple to make the Christmas List of any marketing and PR professional.

Real-Time Marketing & PR, by David Meerman Scott

Subtitle: How to instantly engage your market, connect with customers, and create products that grow your business now.

I got my copy of Real-Time Marketing & PR end-October and I just read it yesterday. Mmmm, not exactly a real-time book review then. My only excuse is that I’ve had to focus on completing my own book (the manuscript is now submitted and it’s due out in April with Wiley, the same publisher of David’s latest books).

Let’s cut to the chase. Should every marketing and PR professional read this book? Yes; even those who consider themselves or are considered to be at the leading edge of this sort of thing. And I make that assertion simply on the basis that David peppers the book with many case studies and examples that will prove useful when attempting to convince the less savvy amongst your colleagues and clients of your point of view.

It's all about curation

Fri, 10 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

If one word has dominated social media in the second half of 2010, for me it’s “curation”. We have reached a certain maturity in our interaction with media to question our traditional abdication of curation to others.

Until recently, people we don’t know decided what we might like to read, listen to and watch. Our only choice, should we disagree with theirs, was to switch channel; change newspaper; retune the radio. And employ technology like personal video recorders to collect what we might want to watch later.

Now a new breed of services is emerging, sometimes referred to as social news aggregators.

Marketing and Communications in the Internetome

Fri, 10 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been out of circulation but had a crazy week before I left, including chairing the launch of 6UK for the promotion of the new Internet Protocol and running the UK’s first Internet of Things conference, Internetome . Thanks to the Intellect events team for super event management, and to the sponsors Intel, Qualcomm, Consumer Electronics Association, Meanwhile and 6UK.

Here’s my presentation “Marketing and Communications in the Internetome”:

Marketing and Communications in the Internetome

The next big big thing: it's happening now

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

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.

CIPR Presidents Debate

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I enjoyed having the opportunity to grab a couple of minutes with the CIPR ’s new CEO, Jane Wilson, prior to putting members’ questions to the two candidates for CIPR President-Elect 2011, President 2012. Thanks to Rob Brown and Sally Sykes for accepting the invitation, and thanks once again to the Markettiers4dc team for making it happen.

Real-Time Marketing & PR

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

David Meerman Scott’s new book is out, Real-Time Marketing & PR – How to instantly engage your market, connect with customers, and create products that grow your business now.

I’ve been gearing a client up for real-time marketing and PR recently. I’m in the midst of helping them prepare for the launch of a gorgeous new app for iPhone, iPod Touch and Android in November. (Ping me if you’re interested in social news readers and I’ll make sure you get your hands on it as soon as.) And part of that preparation has focused on the active listening capabilities and the workflow management needed to keep on top of the conversation and in the conversation. Thanks to the team at Nielsen Buzzmetrics , we have prepared all the search terms and we’ve made use of existing infrastructure to make sure the team understands who needs to respond and by when, as efficiently as possible without headache!

In conversation with Robert Phillips, CEO Edelman UK

Thu, 21 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I really enjoyed having the opportunity to ask Robert Phillips (@citizenrobert ), CEO Edelman UK, his opinion on the state of the PR profession. Robert believes that public relations is at a pivotal moment when, confronted by the brutal transparency of social media, the profession has the opportunity to embrace the public information and two-way symmetric models as the default rather than the exception, ditching the spin and persuasion attitudes and connotations. Resigning them to history, or at least to publicists.

Friday Roundup – Goodbye AVEs

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

Following establishment of the Barcelona principles in June this year and the annihilation of any idea that AVEs (advertising value equivalents) represent the value of public relations, AMEC (the Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication) has moved on to ask two questions:

What are the “validated metrics” to replace AVEs?
How do you get started in measuring social media, and what are the definitions of relevant metrics?

This work is being led by the US Agency Research Leaders Group chaired by Ketchum’s David Rockland, and formed a significant chunk of the conversation at last week’s IPR 8th Annual Measurement Summit .

If you’re looking for one slidestack that walks you through the principles and explores the progress made to date in answering the questions above, check out this presentation: “Validated Metrics - Social Media Measurement”, delivered during the summit by Mike Daniels (Director, Report International and Chair, AMEC) and Tim Marklein (Executive Vice President, Measurement & Strategy, Weber Shandwick), and moderated by Peter Wengryn, CEO, VMS.

IPR Measurement Summit – Barcelona Principles Taskforce Recommendations

View more presentations from Institute for PR Measurement Commission .

I think the work to date is most definitely going the right way; seeking to identify the desired outcomes of a public relations programme and working backwards so to speak to establish metrics that belie the programme’s success accordingly. And I was particularly pleased with slide 25 on influence rating / ranking which corroborates my recent contribution to the Monitoring Social Media conference, “the fallacy of the influentials ”.

This jigsaw is coming together. We will have some operationally sound frameworks available next year, and I’m hoping my own book, “The Influence Professional”, might make some useful contribution when it emerges from the publishing process in Spring. Whatever the timeline, you should have begun winding down any remaining reliance you have on AVEs by now. It’s not a case of waiting to transition from mediocity to good; AVEs don’t even make the cut as mediocre, they are specious, misleading and unprofessional. Period.

The fallacy of the influentials

Mon, 04 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Life’s complicated, so we better get used to it. That’s my remote contribution to the Monitoring Social Media conference, Boston 2010 . In other words, your marketing and PR campaign does not pivot around finding and persuading 10, 20 or 50 so-called influentials.

We should de-emphasise the application of social Web analytics (aka social media analytics, listening platforms, social monitoring) to finding the influentials. Rather, we should employ these amazing tools and services to actively listen, to learn from the conversation and to facilitate the workflow aspects of joining in the conversation.

Life is complicated. Influence is complex. And it appears that we’re influenced more by our respective 150 nearest and dearest family and friends more often than the other 6 billion combined! I discuss the evidence for this assertion in my video here:

Friday Roundup: Thanks for your permission

Fri, 01 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Thanks for your permission to email you with the Friday Roundup today.

It’s been over a decade since Seth Godin published Permission Marketing and as the Wikipedia entry for the book and the term says, the undesirable opposite of permission marketing is interruption marketing. In short, if you have to interrupt me without my permission in order to attract my attention, then all you’ve done is distracted me from what I was otherwise interested in. And if you do that, you simply risk putting your brand on the back foot as a result.

I’ve been interrupted a lot this week.

Firstly there was the first episode of this season’s must-watch period TV drama on British TV (I know, but what can I say, I like them!) Downton Abbey has the perfect stoneware pudding bowl full of characters and plot lines, but it also had something else in abundance, and to a saturation uncommon for Britain, adverts. The Guardian was none too pleased either.

Second, how many of you enjoy those ads that take up your entire browser when all you want is the content? I’ve been counting… 9 this week.

Third, I followed a link to a video a friend said I’d like. Unfortunately, I don’t know if I do because I had no intention waiting for a 60 second car advert to show, particularly as I’ve just bought a car and I wasn’t interested in the marque interrupting me anyway.

Surely there must be better ways to connect marketers and content. I know the adverts pay for the dramas we love, but I won’t be watching any of the ads now; I’ll ’time-shift’ episode 2. Better four classy, memorable one-minute adds in the hour than seven bundles of hectic 30-second rubbish. I’d watch it live then.

And this all goes to show that I can empathise just a little with those poor journalists on the receiving end of so-called PR spam. Non-relevant interruptions to their day caused by the spray-and-pray practices of the lesser practitioner. If this matter concerns you, if you don’t want to be annoying the very people you hope to influence, do check out the Media Spamming Charter published this week by the CIPR, PRCA and IRS. If you know what’s good for business, do make sure your PR team subscribes to it and has the discipline to stick to it.

Best regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.

CIPR TV featuring the High Priest of Publicity, Mark Borkowski

Wed, 29 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

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 :-)

Friday Roundup: Are you an Influence Professional?

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Public relations isn’t just media relations. Marketing isn’t just promotion. Promotion isn’t just advertising. PR isn’t just one-way. Digital isn’t just Web.

I’m writing a book, provisionally titled Influence Professional. It’s about influence and a new role in the marketing and PR mix. It’s also about taking a good look at where marketing and public relations got to in the 20th Century, what happened in the last ten years, and what will happen in the coming decade that will make the last ten look like we were just taking it easy.

Most intriguingly, on talking to as many people as I can, not only have I found little useful understanding amongst those looking in on our professions, but I’ve found inconsistent definitions and misunderstandings between our respective disciplines.

Contribute to the Influence Professional book

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

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.

The 1st CIPR TV show

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

CIPR TV is underway!

I co-presented the first show this afternoon at 5pm with Stephen Waddington (@wadds ) and, despite the novice presenters, two aspects worked really well. First up, Paul Mylrea was a fantastic guest. The BBC’s Head of Press and Media Communications, and the CIPR’s 2011 President, Paul was never stuck for an interesting and articulate response to a wide range of questions spanning public sector PR, reputation washing, graduate recruitment and internships, diversity, the CIPR’s response to the ASA’s misguided stance towards social media , and his plans for the CIPR next year.

The Friday Roundup: The ASA's misstep

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Some things aren’t quite as simple as first they seem. And when this is the case, it’s good practice to consult widely. And on this count, the UK Advertising Standards Authority (ASA ) has failed.

On 1st September, the ASA announced: “Landmark agreement extends ASA’s digital remit ”. The scope of its Committee of Advertising Practice, the body responsible for the CAP Code governing UK advertising, will extend to “apply in full to marketing communications online, including the rules relating to misleading advertising, social responsibility and the protection of children. The remit will apply to all sectors and all businesses and organisations regardless of size.”

Now who could possibly argue with that?

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

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Intro to Web 3.0 and the Internet of Things

View more presentations from Philip Sheldrake .

@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.

Hosting CIPR TV... live at five!

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9ZeMQM-TQo&feature=player _embedded

The last time I was on TV it was the BBC’s Working Lunch, March 2002. I was running Europe’s first email money service at the time (before PayPal was available in these parts) and our servers were struggling quite a lot under the weight of our success on eBay UK. Facing up to a firm line of questioning, I was able to reassure Working Lunch viewers that any money they had stored with us was safe and sound.

Fast forward eight years and the definition of TV has changed somewhat. Indeed YouTube wasn’t even launched until 2005, before going on to be the fastest growing website ever. By 2007, the capacity consumed by YouTube exceeded that of the entire Internet in 2000. In May this year, over 24 hours worth of video was uploaded to YouTube for every single minute of the month!

And now we have .

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.

Ethics in PR Measurement

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I took part in the #measurepr Twitter chat today on ethics in measurement. These chats are organised by Shonali Burke and her blog post “Influence: From BS to Best Practice ” set the scene nicely.

At the most fundamental level, we were asking whether some of the techniques being deployed for PR measurement are compatible with the aspiration of public relations professionals to be transparent and authentic, and, more precisely, whether they are compatible with codes of conduct as published by the likes of the CIPR , PRSA and CPRS .

In one of my tweets I suggested a more straight forward test, what one might describe as a layman’s test for those of us uneducated in the matters of ethics:

RT @kseniacoffman : Q2: Where do you go for best practices? <– Ask your mum, siblings, neighbours what’s acceptable to them!? #measurepr

At Shonali’s invitation, I contributed the three questions posed today…

Friday Roundup: Let's get emotional... a milestone for PR and marketing

Fri, 06 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

A very interesting thing happened at the end of July.

It affects every single practitioner in the public relations industry, indeed practitioners across all marketing disciplines.

And yet I haven’t found one reference to it amongst the PR digerati yet, so I’m going to put that right. Now.

The subtleties of digital

At its core, this digital world is just a set of 1s and 0s that have been applied with increasing sophistication and power. It revolutionised the more numerical professions first, such as accounting and engineering in the seventies, before moving through manufacturing in the eighties and retail in the nineties.

In the noughties, “digital” arrived big style in the lives of marketing and PR professionals simply because it arrived big style in the lives of the stakeholders we look to communicate with, learn from and influence.

My browser history is my own, so back off with your unethical social media metrics

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Privacy is a personal thing. Some people want to be as “off grid” as they can get. And then there are those who actually bolt a camcorder to their heads and stream their life 24/7. Irrespective, I believe there are some things that everyone expects to be private by default; even Marc Zuckerberg ! And one of these is your browser history… the log that lists every webpage you visit.

It’s this list that enables modern browsers to suggest auto-completions for URLs as you enter them in the address bar. It’s this list you might visit when you’re trying to find that something or other you stumbled across the other day. It’s this list that allows your browser to try to render unvisited links one way, underlined blue by default, and previously visited links another way, underlined purple by default (even though individual webpages and associated styling information may actually override these defaults).

My browser history is mine. My wife’s browser history is hers. Your browser history is yours.

But whilst the Internet turned 40 last year, the World Wide Web is still a teenager, and that relative immaturity places irresistible temptations in the path of the less ethical. And being able to read your browser history is just one of those.

Has your browser history been “sniffed” recently

You wouldn’t know.

The Web of data is a Web of influence

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a fan of Web 3.0. Perhaps obsessed is a more accurate description.

Web 1.0 is the Web of documents. Web 2.0 is the social and user content Web. Web 3.0 is the point at which the Web itself understands that content and social interaction. Some call it the semantic Web, and some call it the Web of data, but regardless of naming conventions, it’s going to mess up a hell of a lot of business models, and create some fascinating new business and public-benefit opportunities. And it’ll transform reputation management too.

If you think ‘atoms of influence’ trickle far and wide courtesy of human expressions and understanding with social media acting as loyal conduit, just wait until machines understand these contributions too.

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.

An interview with Seth Godin - PR not publicity

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

[caption id=“attachment_27421” align=“alignright” width=“250” caption=“Seth Godin - www.flickr.com/photos/joi/4035933108/" ] [/caption]

Seth Godin is a perceptive individual. He spots things the rest of us are too busy to see, and then lets us know about them in an easily-digestible format. Sounds like a cracking formula for a best-selling author if you ask me… and of course he is.

With a dozen titles to his name, including Tribes, Meatball Sundae, perhaps most famously Permission Marketing, and most recently Linchpin, interviewing Seth was always going to be both entertaining and insightful.

Interview with Seth Godin

TweetDeck's Iain Dodsworth at CIPR Social Summer

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Last night the CIPR Social Summer series hosted a session on all things TweetDeck . If you haven’t tried TweetDeck, try it now. It’s free!

According to Twitstat.com today, after simply tweeting at twitter.com, Tweetdeck is the most popular Twitter client globally. Here’s the stats I just grabbed from Twitstat:

Rank		Client	% of users	Tweets/user
1	(1)	web	16.80 %	2.90
2	(2)	TweetDeck	9.50 %	3.17
3	(6)	twitterfeed	5.90 %	5.58
4	(3)	foursquare	5.85 %	1.49
5	(4)	Twitter for iPhone	5.85 %	2.38
6	(5)	HootSuite	5.39 %	2.68
7	(8)	Echofon	3.22 %	3.25
8	(25)	API	2.76 %	6.66
9	(7)	Tweetie for Mac	2.55 %	2.38
10	(9)	Seesmic	2.16 %	3.02

But TweetDeck is more than a nice way to shepherd incoming tweets and craft your own. TweetDeck is rapidly becoming the most powerful way to manage your social networking without ever having to log onto each and every social network yourself. It aggregates Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Buzz and Foursquare, and it even lets you watch YouTube videos brought to your attention by your social network in situ.

So I was particularly delighted when TweetDeck MD Iain Dodsworth (@iaindodsworth ) accepted our invitation to join us for one of our sessions to share his insights and answer our questions.

An interview with Brian Solis

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Image by affiliatesummit via Flickr

I interviewed Brian Solis for the CIPR’s website recently. Brian is one of the most prominent thought leaders and published authors in new media. A digital analyst, sociologist and futurist, Solis helps practitioners get to grips with the effects of emerging media on marketing, communications and publishing.

His perspectives are well worth a listen:

SEO changing up its game... it's called PR

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

My recent post “Where’s your brain at? Where’s your consultancy at? ” was prompted by a fascinating discussion at the CIPR Social Summer session on the 1st July at which we debated aspects of search engine optimisation (SEO) and the PR profession’s paralysing hesitancy to grasp the SEO nettle.

Well personally I’m excited not paralysed, and I keep a beady eye on great information sources such as SEOmoz and Search Engine Watch, and I’m posting today to highlight a couple of posts I’ve just found.

Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz’s CEO, has written a super perspective that should be read by everyone interested in the ebb and flow of the SEO world, particularly as it relates to activity one might consider to be in the PR domain. “The Death and Rebirth of Editorial Citation on the Web ” identifies three epoques to date of web linking activity:

Friday Roundup - is social media good?

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

Is social media good? This is possibly one of the most interesting questions I’ve been asked in my consultants’ capacity in recent times. Of course almost all media is now social, or has a social component. Take the BBC’s Question Time ? Sure, its live audience participation is social, but for the rest of us it’s simply broadcast TV. But things have only got more interesting for the programme’s fans as the Twitter backchannel has allowed us all to join the debate.

But is social media “good”?

I hadn’t seen Stephen Waddington’s post this week about the police effort to capture a killer-at-large in Northumberland when I was asked this question, but his description of “digital rubber necking” makes one pause for thought. For those unfamiliar with the phrase, rubber necking most often refers to those motorists who slow down to see some vehicular carnage, and it appears that Stephen isn’t too enamoured of the social media equivalent. Indeed, I felt most uneasy reading that the killer’s facebook page now has 17,000 members.

So, my answer?

One Web. Many social networks. Facebook's Achille's heel.

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Facebook will die.

When it comes to asserting my regard for Facebook’s prospects I feel a bit like the guys over at housepricecrash.co.uk. This website was set up by friends with a mutual interest in the UK property market in 2003 and, as the name of the site subtly betrays, they predicted a bit of a tumble in house prices. And of course they were proved right. Eventually!

But social networks aren’t subject to the same dynamics as the ‘irrational exuberance’ that fueled the house price climb to an all-time high. In the arena of social networks it comes down to a mix of ‘softer’ issues, such as the simple push and pull of fashion, and ‘harder’ issues, such as the underlying technological construct of a social network.

Economics can take a role, most obviously at play with the so-called ’network effect’ eBay concreted in many markets, and in their ceding some markets to Yahoo! for example where Yahoo! secured that market’s network effect first. But that’s more ecommerce than social networking.

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.

Where's your brain at? Where's your consultancy at?

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

Do you ‘do’ search engine optimisation? If so, it seems you are most probably a SEO consultant because public relations consultants who ‘get’ SEO appear to be very thin on the ground. Not only that, but some argue that’s how it should be.

Nixon McInnes’ managing director Will McInnes, ever the polemicist perhaps, asserted during yesterday evening’s conversation on SEO that to fuse the two disciplines would have to entail some kind of genetic engineering along the lines of a pig-monkey hybrid.

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**

CIPR Social Summer on mobile marketing

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

I’m not a fan of the iPhone, or iPad come to that (more later). But it wasn’t until yesterday evening at the CIPR that I learned quite how manic some marketers have become. The following conversation won’t be verbatim as I wasn’t party to it, but it’s a good representation of the story as I heard it last night from those who are having these conversations too regularly:

_________

Marketer: We need an iPhone app?

Mobile marketing expert: Righteo. Why’s that?

Marketer: Because they’re really cool and cool’s where it’s at for our target demographic.

Mobile marketing expert: Cool, yes, and who’s the target?

Marketer: Teenagers.

Mobile marketing expert: Do you know that iPhone penetration is just 4% in the UK, and that’s only 0.5% amongst UK teenagers?

Marketer: Oh :-(

_________

The bring all sorts of people together under one roof for a beer and a chat about specific interesting issues. On conducting a quick straw poll of the super collection of people last night, we had roughly an equal split of Blackberrys, iPhones, Android (mostly HTC) and ‘other’, making for an unrepresentatively high proportion of smartphones.

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:

Making sense of social analytics

Tue, 08 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This is my article as it was published in New Media Age yesterday:

The Chartered Institute of Public Relations Social Media Panel launched a Measurement Group last month to help practitioners navigate what is a rapidly developing and increasingly confusing area, writes Philip Sheldrake.

As I commented in the Social Web Analytics eBook in 2008:

If you could go back to the mid-1990s and offer a marketer a little box that would sit on their desk, let them listen in on thousands of customer conversations and participate in those discussions regardless of geography or time zone, it would appear so far-fetched that they’d probably call security.

And yet here we are, with somewhere upward of 200 services vying to be our eyes and ears on the social web. Social analytics is a growth market reminiscent of web analytics ten years ago, with all the potential and confusion that comparison implies. The market is just beginning to demand that some order, consistency and semblance of maturity is brought to bear, and the three big asks are:

Social analytics, Katie Delahaye Paine and the CIPR Social Summer

Fri, 04 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a bit of a ‘first’ going on at the CIPR… yesterday we had the first CIPR Social Summer meeting at CIPR HQ, which is the first of a series designed openly on a wiki by members for members and non-members. The sessions run most Thursdays, 5pm-7pm, over the summer months.

So I was in nirvana!.. Central London, the coolest city in the world, in a lovely building with a cold beer in hand discussing one of my favourite topics, social analytics, with some very nice and equally excited people. Ah, life’s hard.

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!

CIPR Digital Impact Conference

Wed, 26 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

The CIPR hosted a smashing event on Monday focusing on the impact of digital and attracting delegates from all sectors as well as a mix of in-house and agency.

I was given a half hour slot to throw my perspectives into the mix, and I decided I’d focus in on the following assertion:

It’s my opinion that the things people think have change haven’t, but some things have changed that aren’t yet widely understood.

Best practice guidance and policy for social media measurement from the CIPR

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

The Chartered Institute of Public Relations announced this week one of the first actions to come out of its newly formed Social Media Panel … the Social Media Measurement Group.

Some time back in the early days of media relations some bright spark came up with the idea of using a ruler to measure ‘column inches’, a considerably less than perfect approach to assessing PR campaign success only compounded in its inability to drive performance and measure success appropriately by advertising value equivalence (AVE).

My disgust for column inches and AVE has nearly lost me business on more than one occasion, but being prepared to work with prospects on improved approaches can end up contributing to the reasons for going on to convert their business.

Without a doubt, the simplest and shortest response to someone’s defense of such amateur approaches is to ask how they would measure a campaign’s success if a primary objective of a campaign was to keep brand X out of the press? “Oh, errr, well, I mean, that would be, ermm….”.

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.

How social media might help put UK politics on the right track

Sun, 09 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Election 2010 was supposed to be the UK’s first social media powered election, but with the advent of our first ever Leaders Debates, it became resolutely a TV-powered election.

But that doesn’t mean same-interest groups aren’t coalescing and making their point online; quite the opposite. It’s just that the majority of the British public aren’t that engaged with social media just yet. And don’t start with that “but Obama did it in 2008” malarkey… sure, he ran a great campaign, but when you break it down you find that the majority “online” effort was plain old email marketing. Good on him, but this hardly makes anyone’s definition of social media.

Let’s take a brief look at two campaigns running right now, post-election.

Chairing the Internet of Things mashup

Wed, 05 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

The BCS, Chartered Institute for IT, hosted the Mashup Event in London last night, an event focused on the Internet of Things. As chair I knew it was important to establish boundaries for the evening’s discussion, but the problem is… there is simply no sector or discipline that is or will be left untouched by the Internet of Things.

Fortunately, I could lean on an expert panel to shoulder the burden of picking out the topics, although I was first to take a stab at defining the topic: a network of objects beyond the ‘usual’ including:

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).

David Orban opened the evening in ten minutes with a fast, furious, compelling and fascinating slide stack. He could have banged us over the head with ten minutes about WideTag , but preferred to situate his company’s endeavours in the bigger picture. Videos from tonight will go up on the Mashup Event website, but if you can’t wait, here’s a video of David in action at Momo Amsterdam a month ago.

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.

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.

CIPR social media group and the Semantic Web

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

The CIPR has assembled a social media group, information about which I’ve appended here for your convenience. I’m delighted to have been invited and look forward to working with the group, half of whom I know and half I look forward to meeting.

One of the first things I’m going to do is to invite the group to a meeting Wednesday 21st April 2010 to present the work to date on the Ontology For Feelings About Things and the PR Ontology, both pieces of work critical to the PR industries contribution to something referred to as the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web is most often what people mean when they talk about Web 3.0.

Your "Awesome Analytics Advantage" starts today

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

In my presentation at Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp 2010 last month (embedded below for your convenience) I dedicated a slide to something I referred to as the “Awesome Analytics Advantage”, making those organisations achieving this advantage “Triple A”!

Fundamentally, this advantage is manifest via the intelligent connection of traditionally siloed analytical services and databases….

retail analytics + web analytics + social web analytics + CRM + sRM + business intelligence + Internet of Things data analytics = Awesome Analytical Advantage!

Well, I’ve just enjoyed a 50 minute webcast by SAS, featuring the queen of measurement herself, Katie Delahaye Paine , during which SAS presented their new social media analytics service and answered questions from the floor and via Twitter (hashtag #sassma ). My conclusion…

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!

Influence - The bullshit, best practice and promise

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Here is the presentation I just delivered to Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp .

It seems to have gone down well from the Tweetstream (some Tweets cut and paste below). Thanks so much to the panellists, particularly as you had approximately zero seconds to prepare!

UPDATE 2nd April 2010: I’m delighted that my presentation on slideshare.net has, according to emails I received from slideshare, been their most discussed document on Twitter and Facebook, globally! That means the presentation was promoted to their homepage too. How cool is that?

View more presentations from Philip Sheldrake .

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.

PR and Web 3.0... a call to action

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Four things struck me in 2009. They are part of a bigger picture that means that public relations practice is about to undergo another change that will be as great this coming decade as it experienced during the last decade…

1. Web 2.0 participation

I dislike the 90:9:1 ratio of passives:occasionals:enthusiasts with respect to the “write” part of readwriteweb. In other words, 90% of people online don’t contribute anything, they remain passive consumers. 9% contibute content and interact now and then, and 1% are passionate bloggers, video makers, photo takers, wiki updaters etc.

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!!!

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.

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.

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:

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).

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.

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.

We are one. We'd like to look like one, talk like one, act like one.

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

There is only one HSBC, one Nokia, one Ford, one Leica. That’s fact. More important than fact, the customer only sees there being one.

Which is the straight forward unquestionable reason why it upsets anyone at all when we interact with a representative of a company, or have any kind of communication with a company, and the response effectively belies the fragmentation of the organisation, the fact that the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing and actually doesn’t care.

I put “they” in quotes, because we can learn two almost contradictory things from our use of this pronoun. First off, it indicates that we all recognise in natural language that an organisation is simply a collection of people. Just because the 20th Century bred organisations with tens of thousands of people making up “they”, doesn’t detract from the fact that it is still just people. Like you and me.

That’s why we use “they” as the pronoun for a company more often than not in place of the grammatically correct “it”.

Secondly, the “they” also indicates what’s known as the reification of an organisation. In other words, we teach ourselves to consider the organisation as an entity in its own right, a thing, a tangible thing that lives and breathes of itself. We have abstracted it away from being the collection of individuals that it actually is.

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.

Your website and how it would change if it had an "About You" section rather than "About Us"

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

“Nobody cares about your products and services (except you) .” I believe this deliberately polemic assertion from David Meerman Scott is spot on. OK, you could possibly exempt shareholders and fellow employees too, but the implication stands. Moreover, saying “Nobody cares about your products and services (except you and the shareholders and fellow employees)” isn’t quite so catchy!

Think about it. When you bought that Philips TV, did you really care about Philips and its product range? No, you cared about the aesthetics of your living room, the sound and picture quality you’d experience, the screen size that would work with your space and furniture, and the hit to your bank balance.

When you were tendering your PR contract, you didn’t care about agency X or consultancy Y per se, you were focused on your personal and organisational objectives. How could your organisation communicate and come across better than it did? How could you exert influence in your noisy marketplace? How could you get that promotion or pay rise, or both? In fact, I bet the agency you hired talked more about you in the pitch than they did about themselves.

So, on that basis, why does your website have an “About us” section, or equivalent, but not an “About you”? Not only is the latter missing entirely from most websites, it should actually take priority over the former if you think the last three paragraphs rang true.

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.

Tell us about an ad you've come across and loved today

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

This was the question I posed upfront at the Convergence Conversation I chaired last night. The topic of the conversation – “Advertising and the impact of convergence”, and a topic sufficiently compelling to attract 80 people on a summer’s evening.

Deloitte kindly hosted us, with Jolyon Barker , their Head of TMT, kicking off proceedings, and Knowledge and Research Director Paul Lee presenting an overview of their third “The state of the Media Democracy Survey ”. One of the reports main findings is that, following a survey of 2000 Brits, 60% regard their computer to be the premier entertainment device, relegating TV to second place. Not an inconsequential finding for the advertising industry.

Which begged a second question “What is TV?”, and this garnered more responses than my first question of the evening, which went uncomfortably unanswered. How could such a simple question about describing a great ad, particularly when we have hundreds every day to chose from, draw such a blank response? (I’ve posted here one of a series of ads from Lloyds TSB that I loved because they tell a story rather than simply hit me over the head with a product.)

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? ”

Blinkx and you won't miss it - myChannel comes a step closer

Mon, 11 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve just found out about the Blinkx and Miniweb deal from the Guardian’s article “Blinkx moves into telly with new set-top box deal ”.

Blinkx is the rather astonishing video search engine that emerged from Cambridge University (with some confusing ties to Autonomy ), and Miniweb is into “next generation TV” with their platform already powering set-top boxes in over 9 million homes according to their website.

Now you will be able to search through 35 million hours of video from your sofa. Cool, although you might be running dry as you approach your 4,000th birthday, although one would hope some more content will have been indexed by then.

But that’s not the point.

Just over four years ago I posted a blog about “myChannel ” which described a future without, effectively, any channels as we know them today. Or to put it another way, if there’s 7 billion of us on this planet then there are 7 billion channels. Everyone has their own.

myChannel will be created bespoke based on a customisable combination of four sources…

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.

MarCom Professional meet

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

Chew the cud. Share a beer. With over 500 members and two to three thousand unique visitors every week, we want to uncover brilliant ideas for what we can do together; what next for MarCom Professional?

Where and when… http://tinyurl.com/dogduck , Soho, London, 6.30pm, 20th May 2009.

Updates here and @sheldrake . Hope to see you there!

P.S. The current description of what MarComProfessional is about is here FYI.

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.

Meltwater, visualising influence and a big sphere that might not fit conveniently in your office

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

The Meltwater Social Web Analytics team came round today to tell me about their plans for their service. They are starting out with the confidence and aggression that typified Meltwater’s entry into the ’traditional’ media monitoring six years back… and they’ve done pretty darn well in that regard.

For speed to market, they are currently white labelling Techrigy ’s rather nifty SM2 service (shout out to @aaronnewman ), and I understand this will form a ‘base’ or a foundation for their endeavours going forward.

I enjoyed our conversation. In the short hour we had together we covered approaches to quantifying influence, assessing Twitter, semantic analysis approaches to gauging sentiment (aka tone), the growth in the number of Social Web Analytics vendors, the importance of the UI and ‘prettiness’ of charts, and pricing.

We debated my assertion that no one service serves all needs right now, and that a stable of differently capable services (often at different price points) is required. We even had time to chew over how Racepoint Group has achieved such distinct leadership in this field :-) and the prospects for data visualisation.

Data visualisation

Which is a super segue to another couple of interesting videos on my continuing obsession with and search for data visualisation technology and approaches to assist PR consultants in influencing and be influenced more effectively and efficiently.

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?

There is no such thing as a Twitter Strategy - supporting perspective in Ad Age post

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

A few days after I posted the succinctly titled “There is no such thing as a Twitter Strategy but you should have clear expectations for your corporate Twitter profile ”, B.L. Ochman posted “Top 10 Reasons Your Company Probably Shouldn’t Tweet ” on the Ad Age DigitalNext blog.

Right up there at number 1:

You think using Twitter is a social-media strategy. It’s a tactic, a tool, not a strategy.

Now my post elicited some responses via Twitter (@sheldrake ) questioning my definition of the word “strategy”. So for clarity… your social Web strategy is the long-term “how” that follows the “what” of your social Web objectives.

I also agree with number 2 on the Ad Age post… if “every tweet has to be approved by legal” then your organisation is not ready for the social Web let alone little old Twitter. (I’d also argue that your business most likely isn’t ready to do business in 2009!)

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.

There is no such thing as a Twitter Strategy but you should have clear expectations for your corporate Twitter profile

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

I’m amazed at the frequency with which I come across people discussing their Twitter Strategy, or their Facebook Strategy. Contrast this with offline terminology… we never talk about a Press Release Strategy or a Features Tracking Strategy.

Twitter and Facebook et al are one of many channels or platforms through which we wish to engage stakeholders in conversation. The strategy, then, is the plan we set ourselves for our use of social media to achieve our business objectives.

The strategy is constructed to meet our objectives and is informed by deep insight into best practice application of social media.

The strategy sets out the framework for our current and future adoption of social Web channels, platforms, services and gizmos. It helps us work out which of these to adopt and how they might work together. It describes the over-arching ethos and policies for social media use, organisation-wide, and clearly articulates how success is to be gauged, month in and month out.

There is no such thing as Twitter Strategy, and if you think there is then you are Twittering for Twitter’s sake and not for business success.

Friday fun with "The Garden of Tweetdom"

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

This slideshow made me laugh.

View more presentations from The Kaiser .

I’ve been a Twitter user now for two years, and I’m intrigued by its success.

You can attribute its success to its incredible simplicity, leaving the wider community to develop applications and ‘clients’ that anyone can chose to adopt or ignore.

You could attribute it to the character limit, meaning that no-one has to worry that they have to put much work into Tweeting (something that holds blogging back to this day), yet also short enough that clever-clogs can innovate and play games with the limitation.

You could attribute it to the ingenious (and incredibly obvious… with the advantage of hindsight) tweak to instant messaging. Take something that is already incredibly popular, but make it more public, more ‘many-to-many’.

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.

Visualising content to improve your understanding of the conversation

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

Data visualisation is a hobby of mine and a frequent topic of my posts. Frequent readers will know that I believe data visualisation to be invaluable to PR professionals in their craft, in their seeking to understand and exert influence.

IBM’s awesome Many Eyes service has recently introduced a new way of visualising swathes of text (“unstructured data” in the words of the experts). An analysis they’ve called “Phrase Net”. The easiest way to demonstrate what that means is simply to post up an example.

So I took the text from the last three months of featured posts on MarCom Professional and pasted it into Many Eyes and selected the Phrase Net visualisation, and hey presto…

Conversations start with something interesting to say delivered in an interesting way - Part 3

Sun, 22 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

YAWN!

A yawn is never a good way to start a conversation. As the first two posts in this three-part series pointed out, the way you start the conversation is as important as the content (part 1 and part 2 ).

I’ve not tried to be exhaustive in describing some of the multimedia formats you might adopt in starting your conversation, and the posts to date have covered video, animation and a call-to-action microsite. I wanted to finish with an interactive website employing a game to draw visitors in to the key messages; draw them in to thinking about the issues; excite them about propogating the message.

Just needed to find one I really liked.

Fortunately, I was Haymarket Brand Media’s guest at the Revolution Awards at the Grosvenor, London, on Friday evening (thanks again for inviting me Matthew), and now I don’t need to look any further.

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.

Conversations start with something interesting to say delivered in an interesting way - Part 2

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I posted a few weeks back about how organisations must engage stakeholders in dialogue, and how this conversation starts by not just having something interesting to say, but delivering it in an interesting way .

After all, whilst marketers consider the 30 second ad to be on its last legs because it tries to wallop all and sundry, you can take longer to get your point over if you’re talking to those whose interest is already sparked and who want to find out more.

My last post featured a video and an animation, and I promised to come back with some more formats for starting a conversation in an interesting way. For topical reasons I have another animation for your interest, but the main feature in this post is a call-to-action-microsite.

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.

Dear PR Week, it's not about Twitter per se

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

In an unstunningly simple article in PR Week today ("Twitter has suddenly exploded ") we learn amongst other things that Edelman has 17 twittering staff and Racepoint 8, whilst Drew Benvie has twittered 3779 times.

I’d write here things like “AWESOME” and “WOW, HOW ENLIGHTENING”, but I understand sarcasm is the lowest form of wit so I’ll refrain.

What’s with all the numbers? Why on Earth are they the story? But before I explain myself, I will just dwell on the numbers for a minute.

…I don’t know a Racepoint consultant who isn’t on Twitter, and there’s a lot more of us than eight people! How can Porter Novelli global digital director Mat Morrison feel so confident in his data? He should have at least added the caveat that one can only determine when a Twitter user is a consultant from a specific PR consultancy should the individual chose to promote the fact in their personal profile.

Conversations start with something interesting to say delivered in an interesting way

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

To recap, this is where marketing communications has got to…

Interruption marketing (stop right there for 30 seconds while I hit you with this message even if this message is totally irrelevant to you) is dead.

Your brand and reputation is defined by everyone’s experiences with your organisation and their compulsion to share those experiences with others.

You simply have no choice, you have to converse. Dialogue is where it’s at. If you’re into monologue, then it really is the same thing as staying at home and still thinking you’ll get the girl.

So I thought I’d focus here on how to present your conversation starter rather than the content per se.

Multimedia engagement is one of the most compelling and interesting ways to start a conversation about something interesting. Just think what’s grabbed your attention online recently. The 30-second TV ad may be as relevant today as monetary policy, but the 300-second roll on the Web is perfect for the niche audience out there with whom you really want to engage and who really wants to know more about what you’ve got.

So what kind of multimedia are we talking? How can we spark the conversation by communicating the really interesting thing we have to say in an interesting way? There’s no formula (that I know of!), but here’s a couple of my favourites to stimulate your “PR 2.0” synapses, one film and one animation. I’ll follow up this post some time soon with my favourite interactive-game-with-a-point-to-make and call-to-action-social-microsite.

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.

Mobile World Congress - devices every marketer should know about

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Despite the recent follies of the bankers, business remains business and technology marches onwards. And at this year’s Mobile World Congress the mobile industry is putting the user front and centre in every effort to differentiate one from another.

Smaller. Lighter. Brighter. Faster. Easier. And most of all, as user-friendly as can be.

This colourful image is a bank of Samsung Omnia ’s demonstrating their bright OLED screens. I’d like to show you one of their new devices but photography was not permitted. What a crazy decision. This is a SHOW. There are many journalists and bloggers here and Samsung tells us photography is not allowed… it can only make anyone think that the Samsung team has no idea about social media marketing!

I spotted a marketing innovation from Qualcomm Mediaflo … a technology to stream data to mobile devices predominantly for video applications such as real-time TV. Rather than interrupt viewing with the same adverts for all viewers, one of their latest innovations allows a different set of adverts to be delivered based on rudimentary user segmentation.

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.

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.

Visualise your SEO

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Tableau Software knows just a thing or two about data visualisation. A spin out from Stanford, the company won the CODiE award for best business intelligence solution 2008… it’s amazing what the faculty of visualisation can do for your intelligence, or your PR as anyone who has followed my obsession with data visualisation in public relations will know I believe. (Previous posts on the topic appended.)

Tableau Software’s Niels Hoven has posted about using visualisation techniques (and a nifty Excel plug-in from Microsoft) to delve into the content of rival websites to determine keyword effectiveness and make your final keyword selection. He even rounds off by employing visualisation to measure the effectiveness of your SEO work. Nifty.

Does Facebook Matter? Find out in the second edition of Marketing To The Social Web

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Larry Weber releases the 2nd edition of Marketing to the Social Web today. After the first edition sold out, the publisher (Wiley) asked my chairman to update the book for a second run.

With a foreword by Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia, the second edition includes new chapters on Facebook (entitled “Does Facebook Matter?”… he believes it does and moreover will surpass Google), measurement and marketing to mobile social media.

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 :

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…

Visualising your world of influence with Skyrails

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Marketing communications operates within an increasingly complex multi-stakeholder web of influences, and the way many of us can or will be able to devine how influence goes around and comes around, how reputations get built up and eroded, is to look at it pictorially.

My best attempt to date at explaining this in non-mathematical language is in my post “Can you see it? Making influence visible. ” Check it out. More widely, my post “Influence… it’s a numbers game ”, lists all my posts related to this topic.

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.

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.

What's the difference between the social web and social media?

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been asked at least a dozen times why The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008 refers to the “Social Web” and not “Social Media”. In fact, the terms appear to have attracted similar usage according to a quick Google search count today:

“social web analytics” - Google estimates 18,600 results
“social media analytics” - Google estimates 20,100 results

Interestingly, however, the term “social media” attracts more than twice the search count estimate as “social web”:

“social web” - Google estimates 8,250,000 results
“social media” - Google estimates 19,700,000 results

Social media is a subset of the social web.

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.

Communication when you don't have anything to flog

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

What a lovely thing to see at the start of the New Year, particularly this one! A photo of a loved tabby cat under the word “Found” rather than “Lost”.

And a thank you message to neighbours for the help they may have given in recovering said cat… I knew immediately that I’d take a picture of it and write a blog post.

Why?

Why did the cat’s owner feel compelled to go back to her PC, bring up the “Lost” file, edit to “Found”, print it, go outside and staple it to the tree? On the face of it, he or she obviously really loves that cat and might not have had anything else to do with her time… but that’s being cynical. Oddly enough, I now feel more compelled to check my garden and outbuildings next time someone posts up a “Lost” poster because I’ve been thanked in advance. I know someone really cares.

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.

The social Web and agenda setting: a presentation to today's European Agenda Setting Conference, Zurich

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I’m presenting in one hour to the European Agenda Setting Conference on the impact of the social Web. Great presentations this morning from Roland Schatz, President Media Tenor , David W Moore, author of The Opinion Makers , and Ramu Damudaran, Director Civil Society at the United Nations.

Here’s my deck if you’re interested:

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: socialweb socialmedia )

Influence... it's a numbers game

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

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:

You're No One If You're Not On Twitter

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Balance is always a difficult thing to achieve. Whilst the digerati sometimes look down their noses at the masses, much like bankers once did in financial times of yore, they are likely to be as much one side of ’the balance’ as the others. Yes, they might still be languishing on IE6 using Favorites rather than Firefox 3 and Delicious, but are they happy?

Here’s one songster’s take:

Where the social Web goes from here

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

It’s good to talk. The more people can reach out and find the right people and organisations to relate to, to discuss the issues important to them, to learn, to hang out and have fun, to contribute content and opinion and ideas, then the more satisfying they will find being part of society. I’m no sociologist, but it sounds like a good heuristic to me.

I stand by the assertion in my ebook on Social Web Analytics : “Ultimately, the Social Web has revolutionised communications massively and irrevocably, to the benefit of the consumer, the adaptive and agile organisation, and those who cherish an open society.”

Organisations’ engagement with the Social Web is still sufficiently nascent that it offers earlier adopters competitive advantage. And in the longer term however, it will be a condition of staying in the race.

Three amazing things

I’m posting today because three pretty amazing things have happened recently to catalyse this future; to extend the highly networked and Twitter -fuelled connectivity enjoyed by the minority today to the general population. I discuss these below, but first let me put this into context for those of you who not only have a FriendFeed , you’ve already fed it your BackType profile.

You’re not normal.

Giving your PR a work out; exercising your PR in tough times

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I received three emails on the back of my post last week “When the going gets tough, the tough get communicating - or why the tough need muscles ”. I guess getting emails rather than comments underlines the more private nature of such discussions. The post finished by promising to come back with “ways to get your marketing communications to the gym”, and that’s the subject here.

If you have a good personal trainer, what do they do for you? They bring discipline. They set targets and encourage you to meet them. They don’t waste your time with activity that doesn’t contribute to hitting those targets. They keep track of progress and get to know your strengths and weaknesses, literally, and often better than you.

In many ways, this is analogous to your public relations consultancy. As I said in my last post, your marketing communications is muscle and not fat. If you work with a great consultancy, this muscle will be toned and responsive to current market conditions and challenges (if it’s not, change it today).

When the going gets tough, the tough get communicating - or why the tough need muscles

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Times are hard. It appears that the people running our financial systems lost control. And whilst the pundits argue the difference between high finance and the so-called “real economy”, your investors, your shareholders, will be demanding to know how your board is going to respond to scenarios including zero revenue growth and revenue decline in 2009.

When the going gets tough, the tough get communicating.

Here’s a few thoughts regarding the criticality of public relations in recessionary periods.

When Amazon's Mechanical Turk could be the marketers best friend

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

Let me show you an image and ask you some questions. Do complete the questionnaire and all will be revealed later at the end of this post!

________________________________

You might have established that I am not a qualified automotive designer, researcher or marketer. But what do you do when you do want to know answers to questions like these?

Enter Amazon ’s Mechanical Turk service.

Their FAQs describe the service as follows:

Amazon Mechanical Turk is a marketplace for work that requires human intelligence. The Mechanical Turk service gives businesses access to a diverse, on-demand, scalable workforce and gives workers a selection of thousands of tasks to complete whenever it’s convenient.

The Buzz of Social Web Analytics - vendors reach out for the 2009 eBook

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The social Web analytics (SWA) field is buzzing, and I’m being contacted by companies in the sector that I didn’t know about when I published The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008 on the 1st July. They’re keen to make the 2009 update, and at this rate that will have to come earlier than later next year. The 2008 eBook has already been downloaded over five thousands of times, which I’m sure is more reflective of the heat in the market than the quality of my prose!

I define SWA as 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, with emphasis on quantifying the trend in each conversation’s sentiment and influence. Here’s a quick look at some of the vendors reaching out to me, then rounding off with a bit of gratuitous data visualisation of the blogosphere (you know how I get my kicks).

Techrigy

Techrigy describes itself as enabling “organizations to know what’s being said about their brands, products and people across the social media eco-system. Techrigy’s SM2 solution enables organizations to monitor and analyze conversations, including sentiment, across blogs, social networks, wikis, online video and other user-generated content on the web. Ultimately, Techrigy helps organizations embrace social media, manage risk and identify market trends in real time.”

Your first job in PR... questions you should prepare for and questions you should ask in the job interview

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

You’ve just graduated and you’re looking for your first job in public relations. Your first interview is approaching, and you want to make the second interview stage, of course! You visit the company’s website, polish your shoes and get to their offices half an hour too early :-)

Now what? Can you talk about your approach to press releases? No. Can you discuss case studies? No. Can you describe the work environment in which you’ll thrive? Not articulately, without work experience. Should the interviewer really ask you any of these? No. So what goes on beyond the “Tell me about yourself” opener? How should you prepare?

Here’s my list of questions you should be prepared for, and the kind of questions you should consider asking. Actually, I’ve just made my co-directors a nice cup of tea to persuade them to contribute to this list too, so thanks to Blaise and Jay .

Questions you should prepare for

“Tell me about yourself.”

A gift. A lovely open question inviting you to present your best facets. If you can’t represent yourself in response to a question like this, then the interviewer will really wonder how you can represent their clients!

Can you see it? Making influence visible.

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a revolution coming in public relations… visualisation.

[Courtesy Christopher Baker ]

Picture the scene

You hold an event to gather key stakeholders together, say a couple of dozen, and you want to maximise the positive networking such an event should catalyse. You’re also aware of a few potential personality clashes. But how many one-to-one relationships are you actually trying to manage here?

It turns out, your relationship with each of them included, that there’s 300 relationships in that room! Wow, and compared to the big ‘World Wide Web’, or the even bigger ‘World’ come to that, this is a relatively insignificant number of people.

Let’s go a step further. Say that there’s just five critical issues facing your industry, each of which has just three positions, say “for”, “against” and “no position”, then each stakeholder can have one of 243 combinations of points of view.

To complete this picture, imagine now communicating the dynamic of this group in a report back to your boss say. How do you represent 300 relationships and 243 combinations of positions? Moreover, how do you portray the network evolving year-to-year, month-to-month, hour-by-hour?

Welcome to the world of data visualisation.

The power of social bookmarking and how to use it in your organisation today

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The more stuff there is, the more difficult it is to find the right stuff at the right time. Guess that’s almost Google’s raison d’etre, but have they got it right? Is there a better or alternative search approach for you and your colleagues, and what would this mean for your marketing and search engine optimisation (SEO )?

Google’s highly secretive approach to working out what might be more relevant to your search query is called PageRank . Fundamentally, their innovation counts a link to a website as a vote for that website’s content. And a link to your site from a higher PageRanked site is worth more than a link from a lowly site.

This approach blew the competition away (remember Alta Vista?), and Microsoft and Yahoo! have been playing catchup since.

But when was the last time you hyperlinked to a website?

The Free Communications Group and the Death of Broadcasting

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

“Broadcasting is really too important to be left to the broadcasters”. So said Tony Benn, Member of Parliament, to constituents in 1968. That same year, the Free Communications Group (FCG) was founded to demand “democratic control of all media”.

Lets skip the next forty years’ analysis of broadcasting motives and actions that so preoccupied these politicians, broadcasters and journalists. In 2008, convergence has emerged as a force of nature, irrevocably changing “broadcasting” globally, and the FCG might just be smiling if it still existed.

I put “broadcasting” in quote marks because I decided, as chair, to start last Thursday’s Convergence Conversation, titled “Is broadcasting dead or merely taking a break? ”, by seeking to define broadcasting. Not as trivial a task as it sounds, rather a critical task if the 65 conversationists who attended the event hosted by BT Media at BT Tower were going to reach a conclusion.

Wordle - extending the fascination of a tag cloud

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

For those obsessed with tags - and what marketer wouldn’t be based on the fact that you want your brand to be a tag as often as possible, and to understand how your content and products are being tagged - check out Wordle . Bringing style to the tag cloud.

Here’s one I ran for MarCom Professional just now (click on it or here to see the original), and then a description of Wordle in their own words.

The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Social Web Analytics (SWA) is 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, with emphasis on quantifying the trend in each conversation’s sentiment and influence.

The advent of SWA is a pivotal moment in the development of the marketing communications industry.

It’s just over ten weeks since I posted about my intention to write an ebook on social Web analytics, and now it’s done. The ebook is hosted at www.socialwebanalytics.com , or you can simply click here to download it .

End-to-end marketing: the possibilities of a new Internet protocol

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

We’re just about to go through a complete renumbering of the Internet, and I think some marketing issues and opportunities will emerge along the way.

The way the Internet works today means that just less than 4.3 billion different Internet devices can be addressed uniquely… an address being just that, the unique identifier stating where packets of information are sent from and where they should go. So just as my work address is Building 5, 50 Brook Green, London, W6 7BJ, UK - a unique address at which I’m sure to receive anything you send me - my current IP address at this Boston hotel is 209.190.164.35.

I know that because I just visited www.whatismyip.com and they looked at the server I was connected to, grabbed the address and stuck it on their homepage for me. Try it.

Twingly - new blog search engine launches

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Twingly launches today, “the next generation blog search engine”. I posted about joining the private beta a couple of months ago, and now everyone is welcome. Check it out. I quite like it. www.twingly.com .

Searching harder - search panel at Being Digital

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Just watched Giles Palmer’s presentation on search trends here at Being Digital . His company, Magpie , is one of those I’m including in my upcoming eBook on Social Web Analytics (pushed back a week or so due to better than expected social life… yes, I have one).

[Simon Grice listens in to Giles Palmers presentation].

Currently Microsoft’s Jeff Kelisky (ex-Multimap CEO) is talking about Microsoft search being an online representation of the real world… 3D search if you like. He’s showing a video of 3D cityscapes, but I can’t see much search going on. Hang on, no, that’s just a virtual Earth 3D demo. Mmmm, looks like Jeff doesn’t know if he’s in search or mapping. Or perhaps both, but as he’s pointed out, we’ve had the panel on location today.

Jeff has also been keen to big up MIcrosoft’s cashback search I posted about recently .

The B2B Social Web - B2B video programming

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

My last post described the first half of my interview with Ecommerce Times. The second half of our interview focused on B2B video programming, or what the publication described as TV Media Relations . B2B multimedia is one of my favourite topics, so I plunged straight in…

Forget “Pop Idol” and “The Apprentice”, B2B programming is the new hot programming. We’re within sight of bespoke TV shows dedicated to your industry, your profession. Coming to a screen near you, a whole raft of new productions with names like Logistics Insights Live, The Coronary Care Beat, Patent Law Update, IT Compliance Bulletin.

But where is this “screen near you”? What is TV?

The B2B Social Web - my interview with the Ecommerce Times

Fri, 30 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The B2B Social Web has arrived and it’s not going to go away.

I was interviewed recently about the Social Web for a series of articles for Ecommerce Times, and here’s the first half of our conversation…

1) What is THE most significant issue regarding the appearance of Web phenomena like social professional networks?

If being an expert or leader in your market is defined as others’ regard for your insight, skills or services, then you must participate in the networks where this expertise is being shared, and where the people you want to influence are going to help shape their viewpoint. For many professions, these networks remain predominantly offline, but this balance will tip in favour of online for most if not all professions eventually.

MarCom Professional is a great example in my industry, and other social professional networks include sermo.com for physicians and inmobile for the wireless industry.

2) What major trends should my readers know about?

The all-singing, all-dancing social network (Friendster, Myspace, Bebo, Facebook) will increasingly represent the minority of our online social networking. We will gravitate towards specialised networks dedicated to our specific sports interest, hobby, profession, health condition etc.

Buying market share - when all else fails, get your wallet out

Thu, 22 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Six searches are conducted via Google for every two on Yahoo and one on Microsoft Live . That’s not how Microsoft would like it. So the news from Microsoft last night (well, by British Summer Time anyway), CASHBACK!

Here’s how it’s worked so far. The search engines deliver paid-for results alongside so-called organic (not paid for) search results. When someone clicks on one of these paid-for results / aka “sponsored links” / aka “ads”, the search engine charges the advertiser. If these ads were served on an affiliate site, the affiliate site owner gets a share of that revenue.

So everyone is a winner. The search engine makes serious revenue (Google made $1.31 billion on revenues of $5.19 billion in the last quarter, the majority from search related ads), searchers see ads relevant to their search query, and the advertisers attract relevant visitors to their websites.

Win a free ticket to Being Digital conference courtesy of Taptu

Wed, 21 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Hi,

Readers of my blog may know I’m speaking on one of the panels at the Being Digital conference, London, 10th June 2008. Well you might then like to know that you can win a free ticket to this event via Taptu… see their blog post here .

Summize - Twitter sentiment analytics

Mon, 19 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Those of you who follow my blog will know I’m currently into Social Web Analytics. Here’s my last post on the topic . So some interesting news from Summize’s labs, a new semantic analysis tool to give you a snapshot of the feeling in the Twittersphere.

Simply go here and enter the brand or object name in which you’re interested. Here’s one I did earlier…

A Rolling Stone gathers no location based information

Fri, 16 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

I met Ronnie Wood this week. He sat down next to me in a bar and bought me a drink. That ranks him in my book as a very nice chap. And I got a 90 minute window into living life as a globally famous rock star, an insight that confirmed my relief, as if the situation could be otherwise, that I’m not a ‘celebrity’…

“Is that Ronnie Wood? Ronnie Wood? Rolling Stones? Ronnie Wood?”
“I don’t believe it… is that really you? We’re big fans of……”
“I’ve got all your albums.”
“Could I have your autograph and a picture with you?”
“I don’t believe it, is it really you?”

Although Ronnie has had four decades to come up with witty ripostes, I particularly liked his response to the last one… “Actually, I only came fifth in a Ronnie Wood lookalike competition.” From what I saw, he has a lovely way in dealing with the countless people that approach him; what the rest of us would call invading our space.

We got talking about my line of work having danced through the ages of music technology, from the vinyl and 8-track of the mid-60s, through compact cassette and CD to mp3. Not unexpectedly, Ronnie mourns the passing of the physical format, but loves the idea that music has returned to the 60s notion that it’s all about the music, having been distracted in between times by the huge music marketing machine. The 80s and 90s were all about shifting massive volumes of records and CDs, and gigging was just a distraction.

Online, offline, up a tree, down a cellar - effective networking is all in the mix

Fri, 09 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Being so fascinated by and engrossed in social networking, and digital media relations more widely, I’m asked on a regular basis “What’s the point of spending so much time online?”.

The very basis of the question betrays the fact that the questioner still, like the majority of people to be fair, feels it necessary to divide their life up into “offline” and “online” portions. Yet they don’t distinguish “time eating / not eating”, “time talking / listening”, “time with new people / with old acquaintances”, “time on the phone / not on the phone”.

Like eating, listening and telephones, digital media simply exists. It is part of life. Sure it may have its unique characteristics, but then what doesn’t? I am living, working, having fun, exploring, innovating, learning… some of which just happens to be online and some offline.

Zattoo... live content TV broadcast on your PC

Mon, 05 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I’m at RIPE56 today and tomorrow. RIPE (Réseaux IP Européens) is a collaborative forum open to all parties interested in wide area IP networks in Europe and beyond, and RIPE56 is, you’ve guess it, the 56th meeting.

This week-long event brings together the best minds on IP networks, and I’m here working predominantly on the issues of IPv4 depletion and IPv6 uptake. This is a complex issue requiring some deft communications.

Right now however, I’m in a very interesting presentation by Thomas Billeter and Fredy Kuenzler of Zattoo . From their website:

Social Web Analytics - my upcoming ebook and a case of cobblers' shoes

Thu, 01 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Two weeks ago, I posted about the fast paced field of Social Web Analytics . I presented a definition of these tools, expressed my intent to write an ebook on the technology and the main vendors, and listed the vendors I intend to cover…

I also invited anyone with experience of wielding these tools to get in touch so I can include comment and insight from them. This invitation is still open.

Listen. The Science of Social.

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

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.

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.

Internet Best Practice Challenge - recognition for your Internet leadership

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Nominet is running their Best Practice Challenge for the second year. The awards recognise organisations, groups or individuals that have worked to deliver a safer, more accessible, diverse and open Internet experience.

The six award categories for 2008 are:

Best development project
Best security initiative
Raising industry standards
Personal safety online
Internet for all
Open Internet

If you think your organisation, or your client’s, should be recognised for leadership in any of these categories, you have until 25th April 2008 to get your entry in ! Winners and runners-up get some significant international exposure feeding in to the UN’s Internet Governance Forum (IGF) and the newly formed UKIGF.

Twingly in private beta - "a next-generation blog search engine"

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve signed up and will let you know what I find when I’m allowed in! From their press release today…

Today we launch a next-generation blog search engine at Twingly.com. Participate in the invite-only beta by getting invited or signing up at beta.twingly.com. So what’s cool with the new Twingly.com?

Spam free, social search

Twingly takes a zero-spam approach to blog search using an algorithmically expanding white list instead of the traditional blacklist. Powerful moderation tools allows us to win the fight against spam by one-click removal of clusters of tens of thousands of spam blogs. Fat tail manual moderation yields quality input to long tail algorithmic filtering.

Social search features allows users to share quality content with each other and the community as a whole.

Powerful search language and tech plan Digg

Twingly provides the world’s most powerful search language for blogs, where search filters can be combined in new ways.

But we’re not done by far! Participate in voting on our tech plan by signing up for the beta. JSON api? OPML import or APML export? Help us decide what’s next!

UPDATE

Well I’ve got my invite and I’ve logged in to take a look.

UK Next Generation Access - what might we have to play with?

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve come a long way since 56k dial-up, and marketers have long taken advantage of the audio-visual capabilities of broadband for advertising (digital media marketing more generically) and not-paid-for influence (digital media relations). You only have to witness the furore created by the online videos seeking to influence the US primaries .

But what is broadband, and where are we going from here?

To quote Connect’s excellent report “Connecting Britain’s Future - the slow arrival of fast broadband ”:

So what do we mean then by fast broadband? There is no standard set of definitions, but commonly:

narrowband would mean up to 512kbit/s
broadband would mean up to 25mbit/s
fast broadband would mean anything over 25mbit/s

The common industry term for such fast broadband is NGA - Next Generation Access.

Over sixty people from the communications industry (the other communications industry… the one with the switches, wires and fibres) came together yesterday evening at the Convergence Conversation event I chair, and invested a couple of hours teasing out the complexities of delivering NGA in the UK.

Convergence Conversation: Prospects for next generation access in the UK

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The third convergence conversation of 2008 will look at the impact that new bandwidth intensive services are placing on the UK’s broadband infrastructure.

I’m delighted to be chairing the event, and we’ll kick off with the following speakers:

Angus Flett - BT Wholesale
Geoffrey Spencer - Nortel
Antony Walker - Broadband Stakeholder Group
Bill Gash - Partners in TV
Mike Aigner - Geo Networks
Chris Barraclough - STL Partners

What’s the topic?

Recent rumblings from ISPs have highlighted the fact that new bandwidth intensive on demand services are placing an enormous strain on ISPs’ “all you can eat” business model. The BBC’s iPlayer alone has already enjoyed rapid uptake with over 17 million programmes streamed or downloaded in the first seven weeks following its Christmas day launch.

Write-off reading and writing. The three R's are dead; long live the three M's

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Despite the hammerings of educationalists, the so-called three R’s are far from sacrosanct: reading, writing and arithmetic. I’m talking specifically about the first two of these.

(OK, I’m not talking about them, I am actually writing and that irony isn’t lost on me. But then I am future gazing, and I could after all have podcast this post.)

Reading and writing have been bedrocks of civilisation, some would say the foundation, and it is only relatively recently that they have had competition as a media for non-synchronous communication. The 20th Century triumphs of broadcast radio, broadcast TV and semiotics compensated slightly for an individual’s illiteracy, but they were far from a perfect substitute and entirely useless when that individual wished to communicate back.

The 21st Century hasn’t taken long however to present a cornucopia of communication possibilities. Whilst applications of the Internet were dominated just a few years ago by text, and lots and lots of it, new applications pivot massively around the audio-visual. “Radio” and “TV” over IP / Narrowcasting / Podcasting / Moblogging / Vlogging / On Demand / Voice over IP / Video conferencing…

Engagement Mapping: the what but not the how

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

When does advertising pay? Apparently, we’re getting closer to knowing courtesy of Microsoft.

The advancement from paying for eyeballs (CPM – cost per thousand times an ad is shown) to paying for click-throughs (CPC – cost per click), appeared at the time to be the ad industry’s nirvana. And then came click-fraud and CPA.

Now if only ‘A’ stood for Acquisition, then we could all go home. Pay £1 ad cost every time you acquire a new customer for your new £50 gizmo (ie, a sale), and advertising becomes a predictable and precisely quantified cost of sale. In this instance, 2% exactly; not 1.9% nor 2.1%.

But that ‘A’ means Action, and that Action may be an acquisition, but more generally it refers to getting a prospect to fill out a form, leave their contact details, sign up for a newsletter, etc. Mmmm, still as much an art as a science then.

Morph

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I’m obsessed with device usability, and high on that list is the graphical user interface. Marketers focused on phones and mobile Internet devices emphasise their understanding of the impacts of the user interface and everything stacked up behind it, but what about the possibilities of mobile sensory marketing?

Future mobile devices will be able to sense their surroundings: sight, sound and smell. We already have forward thinking companies like Mobile Acuity interpretting still images taken by mobile phones for consumer engagement objectives, but what would you do with smell!?

Convergence Conversation: The 21st century classroom - opportunities for digital education

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The second convergence conversation of 2008 will be on the potential impact of converging technologies on education.

What’s being talked about?

Jim Knight, the schools’ minister, recently announced that he wanted to allow parents to access ‘frequently-updated information on children’s achievement, progress, attendance, behaviour and special needs wherever, whenever parents want, using password-protected, secure, online systems’.

Here then is the potential impact of convergence on the delivery of education.

Links from Feb Away Day

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

As promised, here’s the links relevant to all the stuff we discussed on Friday at the Away Day:

Readius at Mobile World Congress

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Following my earlier post from the Mobile World Congress , another gadget update…

Philips spun off Polymer Vision in 2006, and February last year the company announced that their first product would be the Readius. At this year’s show, the company demonstrated the final commercial product for the first time. Slated for a “mid-08” launch, it will be very interesting to observe how retail categorises the device, and its rate of uptake.

Is it a phone? No. Is it an eBook; well yes I guess, but not in the same vein as Amazon’s Kindle or the Reader Digital Book from Sony .

The Readius measures just 75mm x 21mm x 15mm closed, sufficiently compact to slip in a breast pocket or a handbag’s phone pocket with ease. Well, unless you store your phone there of course. But the screen (aka epaper) has to be seen to be believed. It is so un-screen like that I assumed at first I was looking at a mock-up! It’s pretty damn fascinating, and considerably more akin to the pleasure and ease of reading paper than looking at a LCD.

Mobile World Congress: Tech news and the implications for marketers

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

There were no female passengers on the plane. I kid you not. It could only mean I was headed for a gadget fest.

The 2008 Mobile World Congress is buzzing. No signs of a recession here. It’s particularly buzzing about, yet without mentioning, a company that’s not even here. Apple.

Whilst official company statements make no comparison between Sony Ericsson’s 10 new phones and the iPhone, Samsung’s 8 new phones and the iPhone, or Nokia’s 4 new phones and the iPhone, the overarching message is clear. The market will not coalesce on one style of phone. Variety is the spice of life. So up yours Apple.

The mobile phone, or “device” more generically, ranks amongst people’s most personal possessions. It’s up there with your wallet and keys on leaving your front door, and the variations of mobile device will continue to be as diverse as the variations in everything else we consider personal. Clothes. Cars. Furniture.

Mobile devices will never share the same hardware platform, or the same software platform, but they do universally represent the greatest and most enticing conduit to the end-customer the marketer has ever known. For both B2B and B2C, for advertising, interactive dialogue and customer engagement.

Does your campaign measure up to search?

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The evaluation of PR campaign effectiveness is controversial. Forget for a moment the inadequate practitioners that insist all PR must have a benefit so better just get on with it than devote energy to measuring it, and you’re left with an array of evaluation processes as diverse as the number of agencies.

Return on investment

The most over-used term is ROI. And that applies to all marketing disciplines not just PR. For example, I posted last week about the winners of OnMedia’s Best of Broadband Advertising awards , yet when you read the rationale justifying OnMedia’s selections only three out of ten make an attempt to link the campaign to a fillip to the client’s bottom line. “Creative” and “ROI” are not synonymous.

OnMedia Best of Broadband Advertising Awards 2007

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The OnMedia event this week in New York included their Best of Broadband Advertising Awards for 2007. I’ve seen more than half of these videos featured here on MarCom Professional, but I’ve included my favourite of the bunch below. You can see all the winners here .

Produced by Omnicon’s Cutwater (although not going to win a prize soon for accessibility of their own website) and made to look user-generated, the video went viral because, like anything and everything that “goes viral”, it’s interesting content. This time the interesting comes in the form of “how did they do that?”, so you pass it on to ask that questions of your friends.

FT writes about "Gated Communities in Cyberspace"

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The word Cyberspace always makes me chuckle for some reason. Not sure why. Anyway, I noticed an article recently in the FT - “Business urged to woo social network figures ” - about a report from Experian and Hitwise saying, well, that business should make sure they look after influential people online. Cool. My headline would be “Influential people are influential people, online or off”.

But it was the box-out in the article that I wanted to highlight here, particularly as it relates to this MarCom Professional network. Not sure about the examples though. I quote….

Interesting stuff for a Friday

Fri, 25 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Three great sites to play with from a professional perspective, and an intriguing game from a non-professional perspective :-)

Daylife

“Daylife is a news site and distribution platform that organizes the world’s news into a rich landscape of related stories and images of every size and perspective.

Designed to enable new ways to present and explore the world of news, Daylife gathers news from thousands of sources worldwide for you to:

Local Content For Local People

Thu, 24 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

There are degrees of ’local-ness’; after all, Paris is local to London relative to San Francisco. But if, as Graham Jones asserts , the Internet will have an equal if not greater impact ’locally’ than globally, what are the ramifications for content?

‘Local’ is a hot topic,and last week’s Mashup Event was dedicated to the topic. IT enables personalisation of applications and services, and one’s locality must rank up there with all things personal.

Now marry this with the increasing availability of high quality video content, and I’ve become fascinated by the opportunities and benefits of repurposing video content on the fly to match the viewer’s needs precisely.

I’m compelled to make this post having watched last night’s first show of the new series of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares . Always a f***ing entertaining show, I was gobsmacked by the revised editing style. I know. This series is Ramsay’s first in the US and comes out of Fox. I know. I’ve been to the US and witnessed US TV many times, although Fox is ’exceptional’. Acknowledging that I’m making a sweeping generality, US editing is simply unpleasant viewing for a Norfolk boy with traditional British expectations and sensibilities…

You're in IT

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Marketing communications has arrived at its complexity inflexion, and that complexity needs IT. Period. From now on, when you say “I’m a marketing communications consultant”, you’ll also be saying “I’m in IT”.

Computers ‘do’ numbers, and they can ‘do’ numbers pretty well. Accounting is about numbers, and so is much of science and engineering, so computers were rapidly deployed in these disciplines in their early days. They helped crunch complexity, and this same capability drove complexity. IT advances have driven today’s advanced stock trading platforms and other financial systems. It has underpinned our analysis and knowledge of genetics. It has driven finite element analysis, fluid dynamics and other engineering modelling technologies. These are just a few examples, but however you cut it, modern accounting, science and engineering is entirely reliant on IT.

In the 70s, manufacturing was about turning out millions of identical products repetitively, cheaply. Retail was about piling them high. By the 90s, mass production had become mass customisation, as IT enabled complex yet efficient supply chains. Each and every car gliding through production can now be any one of a thousand permutations. The number of Zara ’s annual product lines exceeds the volume made of each; all at affordable prices. Retail analytics informs every decision we make in retail design. However you cut it, modern manufacturing and retail is entirely reliant on IT.

These professions, and others, reached their complexity inflexion. You could say that IT was both a cause and the saviour, and now it’s time for marketing communications. Let’s look at some numbers.

Foggy communications

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

As a director of a consultancy helping clients communicate more effectively, I’m used to analysing the difference between “winners” and “qualifiers”, between Seabiscuit and the also-rans. Maybe marketing communications has evolved so much in recent years, or maybe we just work with good people to start with, but I’d forgotten about the donkeys.

I was rudely reminded of this reality over the Christmas season courtesy of Royal Air Maroc ’s Atlas Blue subsidiary. Crappy, very crappy customer communication. Oh so very crap indeed.

Nevertheless, I’ve been able to wend the story of dealing with Air Maroc into my presentations to customers and prospects on good digital marketing relations, as a counter-example, even though I didn’t interact with Air Maroc digitally at all.

Industry thought leaders... video series

Tue, 11 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Hi,

I thought I’d post up the occasional video from some of our industry’s thought leaders, particularly ones that have influenced me over the years.

It’s also an opportunity for me to use MarCom Professional’s new feature… private social networks.

What better chap to start with than Seth Godin . Here he is on form at TED in 2003. Yes, I know that’s relatively old, but it’s only now that we’re seeing the realisation of his vision, and it still looks very new to many people.

The New Rules of Engagement

Tue, 11 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Brilliant. I have never seen such a collection of awesome and influencing advertising in one place. What’s more, you don’t even realise you’re watching an advert!

A must watch.

2007 - The Year of Social Networking

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

It’s December. Time for pseudo-snow to uphold the pretence of a white Christmas. Time for Christmas pop songs to replenish the coffers of faded pop idols. And, of course, time for reflections on the year.

The biggest trends in marketing communications in 2007 were without a doubt the rise and rise of social networks, and the associated dominance of video content – professional and user-generated. Not a theme ignored on MarCom Professional I can see.

This has been a subject close to our hearts since we ran the first blog training course for our clients in 2001 and introduced them to conversational PR not long after. That was the term we used then, but now we talk about the brand as the sum of the quality of its dialogue with its stakeholders, and our Chairman Larry Weber decided, rightly, that 2007 was the year the mass market wanted to read more about it.

Social Network Levelling

Mon, 26 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

“If Facebook is the Cathedral, who owns the bazaar?”

This evening’s Mashup Event , hosted this time at Merrill Lynch’s London HQ, focused on Social Networks. It was the busiest of the series to date; at over 200 attendees it was twice the size of the one I chaired earlier this year. So congratulations to Simon and Tony on making it happen.

Social networking has arrived. I can say this on the sole basis that we were in less-than-5-star hotel venues not long ago, and now we’re hosted by one of the world’s biggest investment banks! Moreover, the breadth of attendees is growing as more and more employers and leaders become interested in how Mashups affect their business, affect their markets, affect their lives.

Apple provides media training collateral

Fri, 23 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

What better way to communicate the DOs and DON’Ts in a media training class than by example. Here’s one for your training collateral. It is an extreme case; I mean how dare anyone mention Apple iTunes and monopolistic behaviour in the same question?!

Philip Schiller, Apple’s Senior VP of Worldwide Marketing is featured being interviewed by Channel 4 in the UK.

The interview is brought to a rapid close when the interviewer asks “Are you acting in a sort of monopoly way?". Schiller can’t cope with this (whoops, poor media preparation) and looks to his PRs to intercept and take him away from this bad man.

Time

Sun, 18 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I want to sound you out about time. More specifically, billing, prompted by a recent article in the current edition of Business Week.

And what’s happened to Business Week? I was so confused by the format changes that I decided to Google the reason for it, and we’re told the redesign is inspired by the design imperatives of the Web.

But, not being funny or anything, if I wanted Web I’d go to businessweek.com . Surely, if print is threatened by the big WWW, then differentiation is the key to success, not assimilation?

Graphic engagement

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Here at Racepoint we’ve been thinking about the ramifications of one of my previous posts, “Continuous engagement… the death of market research ”. A particular area of interest is the way in which we might help companies interact with stakeholders other than via text-based media.

Yes, I know there’s the telephone too, but following the tenet that restricting the channel can only restrict the quantity and quality of interaction, how else can we reach out and engage?

On the defensive with tech marketing

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

When historians write up 2007, they will surely highlight three things. Of course there’s the subprime mortgage disaster and the reunion of the Spice Girls (a subprime pop group?), but my topic here is the mega marketing clash of the huge tech titans.

I’ve been in tech for some years now, but unless it’s a case of the nearer the clearer, I can’t recall such furiously fought marketing battles.

The last big battles, by popular concensus, were won by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Google’s search. They appeared to trounce the competition, the first by anticompetitive practices according to the European Union, and the second by peer-beating capability. Do you recall an advert for IE or Google?

A press conference with one thing missing

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

FEMA External Communications… information for job applicants. Please check your answers to the following questions:

Question 1.

On calling a press conference, should you give the press…?

A. at least one hour’s notice

B. 17 minutes’ notice

Question 2.

If no press turn up, should you… ?

A. postpone the conference;

B. get your co-workers to stand in as journalists in front of the nation’s live broadcasting cameras.

How did you do?

If you answered “B” to all questions, please send your CV to the Office of the Communications Director, Federal Emergency Management Agency, 500 C Street S.W., Washington, D.C. 20472.

Continuous engagement... the death of market research

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

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:

The Chocolate Box Paradox

Mon, 22 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

There are people who claim to be natural communicators and there are those who struggle to get their point across. Most client teams have a mixture of the gifted and the frustrated – the natural order of things some might say. But this mix of skills in the workplace can lead to basic communication problems that disrupt progress. What we need is a framework to help train teams to communicate effectively.

Advertising in the Age of Convergence 25th Oct 2007

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Part of Intellect’s Convergence Conversation series, the next one is on the 25th October 2007 - “Advertising in the age of convergence”…

What is the conversation about?

Advertising in the age of convergence will look at how new technologies are affecting the advertising industry. At a time where internet advertising spend is now twice the size of outdoor advertising and consumer magazines, and three times the size of radio advertising, how will advertisers adapt their strategies and business models to ensure revenue?

NLA, Agency or Anachronism?

Sun, 14 Oct 2007 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. Now I know rules don’t just expire, but equally, they don’t just stay relevant untouched, and the legal underpin for the NLA’s stance surely demands review. If 2007 marks the year music companies reviewed their attitude toward digital rights management, then it’s time the NLA got real too.

Global Dynamics event 2nd Nov 2007

Wed, 10 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

This conference looks interesting. Can’t make it myself, but it would be good to hear if anyone else is down to go, and then to get your post-event report.

http://www.resultsinternationalgroup.com/events/global_dynamics.html

Marcoms businesses are looking constantly for new ways to serve their clients, and to grow and develop. The Results International 2007 Global conference explores the latest trends and practices in successfully achieving, funding and managing emerging growth opportunities. Some businesses have chosen the route of international expansion into new or high growth emerging markets; others are targeting new and emerging technologies in the digital space.

MMS - the perfect storm

Mon, 08 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

According to Mark Imrie, formerly Head of Products for O2 and now Head of CRM and online capability, “MMS was a technology-led service that was rushed to market”. Quoted in Billing World last month, Mark succinctly explains the lacklustre performance of MMS to date. But where next? What’s required for MMS to take off in 2008?

I’d say it boils down to phone design, pricing and applications, and these three are coming together nicely to form the perfect storm next year.

The first post to the Racepoint intranet!

Tue, 02 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Wonder if this might prove useful? Here’s some fun to start with, with your next holiday in mind…

VideoJug : How To Fold A T-Shirt In 2 Seconds - Explained

The first post

Mon, 01 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Just had a look on the members page and found that the Marketing Director of The First Post , Mario Tilney Bassett, has joined the network. From their website:

The First Post is a free and independent daily online news magazine – a place to find out what the news means, a place to read about the issues of the day in short, sharp, informative articles.

I wanted to post about The First Post simply because I’m a fan. I think it has achieved one of the best online magazine formats I’ve seen to date.

Permission marketing?

Sat, 29 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The attention economy is alive. Interruption marketing is dead. But are we getting permission marketing?

Tony Fish (the Mobile 2.0 man) and I debated the impact of mobile technologies on the attention economy at last week’s Mashup Event . We are particularly intrigued, although not entirely convinced, by the Blyk business model. Having been started by the former president of Nokia, Blyk could not have much better credentials for a new UK mobile phone service, but what are its prospects beyond the initial novelty value?

Shepherds London

Mon, 24 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Having had my third client meal here recently, thought I’d add it as the first restaurant review on MarCom Professional :-)

Fundamentally, I find Shepherds to be a perfect restaurant for client entertaining. Attentive staff. Good location. And the good spacing between tables provides for relative privacy. There is also a private room at the back for larger groups, which from memory seats up to 20.

I particularly like Shepherds for US clients looking to eat English… fabulous sausage and mash!

Magpie Brandwatch

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve just stumbled upon this service, Magpie Brandwatch . As an engineer by training, nothing quite appeals to me more than a good looking chart, but I’d like to ask a question of anyone who knows more about these things than me… How do they disambiguate brand names?

In other words, when looking for commentary about Apple, how do they differentiate between Apple and the type you eat? What if you were trying to track where people are talking about Creative. Great brandname; very very difficult to disambiguate. Virgin? Next? Palm? Shell? Gap?

Mashup events

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Attended the Mashup* event last night on “media and advertising agencies in a digital world”. It was a wide ranging discussion, featuring Rod Banner from Banner Corporation, a presentation from AKQA’s head of mobile, and moderated by Hamish Pringle, DG of the IPA.

Unfortunately, the questions from the audience were so diverse that there wasn’t quite the usual cohesion found at a Mashup event, but nevertheless there were some real gems in there. Tony Fish’s question on the attention economy put most people on the back foot, and I learned about Openads for the first time. Very interesting.

BBC hi-def: common sense prevails

Wed, 19 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

So Ofcom has given the BBC the go ahead to start a high definition channel later this year. Whilst I recognise that anything the BBC does these days has to be scrutinised for “public value” by the BBC trust, but this decision also had to be reviewed by Ofcom with the purpose of assessing the marketing impact.

Ofcom has concluded that the launch of the free-to-air channel is “unlikely to have significant negative market impacts”.

Feature list

Wed, 19 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s a list of things MarCom Professional could do next, in no fixed order.

Review list and status of invited colleagues
Create personal message boards on your own page where other members can leave notes and messages… these are fully public
Include comments in RSS feeds
Create the ability to post easily from mobile phones
Create virtual acquariums (only kidding)
Make it even easier to browse the whole membership
The options to be notified by email or IM or RSS when someone comments on my posts
What about integrating Twitter ?!
When there’s hundreds of posts a day, it would be great to have a more personalised homepage prioritising the posts from friends / colleagues
In the “New features in store ” post, I like the addition of blogrolls and event posts. Guess the latter will help members set-up events and manage attendance
From that same post, I love the member-moderation idea; thumbs up / down voting on posts. What do you think to rationing the number of times members can give a thumbs up or down to try and stop the kind of fixing some people believe blights Digg ?

Mobile Adsense

Tue, 18 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Just found a press release from Google launching their market-leading Adsense service for the mobile device.

“AdSense for Mobile is intended for AdSense partners who have created websites specifically for mobile browsers, and who want to monetize their mobile content via contextual advertising.”

The full release is available here .

The new mobile revenue split

Tue, 18 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

So O2 has won the exclusive right to iPhone in the UK; but what a price! With the battle heating up between operators, device manufacturers and content providers to divide the spoils of user revenue, this seems to be a massive concession for a UK operator.

[gratuitous picture of an iPhone… in case you can’t recall how attractive it is]

Capitulating 40% of iPhone associated revenues can’t make sense to anyone vaguely familiar with thin operator margins. Vodafone definitely wasn’t having any of it. But maybe this is just a big step along the ultimately inevitable path to complete commoditisation of mobile operations. The time has come for the rise of the device and equally the content now reachable following the relatively recent collapse of the walled gardens. This shift in the landscape also represents exciting opportunities to the marketing communicator looking to extend brand presence into consumers’ mobile life.

2007: The Info Tech Year Ahead

Thu, 04 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Niels Bohr said “It is very difficult to make an accurate prediction, especially about the future.”

As we ruminate on our 2007 predictions we also consider another of his insights… “Your theory is crazy, but it’s not crazy enough to be true.” Only time will tell!

Every year we take stock of the trends of the past twelve months, and take time out to map ahead.

We’ve distilled some of our favourites here for your consideration today and possible derision twelve months from now…

myChannel

Wed, 06 Apr 2005 00:00:00 +0000

It started with the town crier. Then the daily newspaper. It broadened with radio and then television. Communication now comes at you from all angles – via papers, magazines, journals, radio, digital radio, satellite radio, terrestrial TV, TV text services, digital TV, satellite TV, cable TV, mobile portals, push alerts on mobile devices, newsgroups, websites, RSS newsfeeds, streaming media services and pod-casting.

The choice has become so complex for consumers that there is even a choice of magazines and websites dedicated to helping us make a choice. The selection and diversity will continue to grow but the act of “choosing” is about to change significantly. We are returning to just one channel – myChannel.