Philip Sheldrake

Not PR – Friday Roundup

// June 3rd, 2011 // No Comments » // Communities/Social Networks, Public Relations

"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. (more...)

My book, The Business of Influence, is out today

// April 15th, 2011 // 1 Comment » // Communities/Social Networks, Digital Media Marketing, Digital Media Relations, Measurement & Analysis, Public Relations, Technology, Website/New Media

Today's the day!

The Business of Influence: Reframing Marketing and PR for the Digital Age

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. (more...)

Radian6 and the Insights Platform – getting semantic

// April 7th, 2011 // 3 Comments » // Communities/Social Networks, Content, Digital Media Relations, Public Relations

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. (more...)

CIPR social media measurement guidance

// March 29th, 2011 // No Comments » // Communities/Social Networks, Digital Media Relations, Measurement & Analysis

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.

The CIPR launches its guidance on social media measurement today. As chair of the CIPR's social media measurement group, I'm particularly keen to learn what you think. I'm afraid it is no silver bullet, and that's simply because there will never be a silver bullet.

Here are the links:

To the social media measurement guidance page on the CIPR's website.

To the guidance PDF directly.

What’s the ROI of social media?

// March 17th, 2011 // 8 Comments » // Communities/Social Networks, Digital Media Relations

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:

Thanks to Julia Lampam (@JuliaLampam) for the invitation to speak.

Influence in the age of the social web – keynote to EUPRERA

// March 4th, 2011 // 3 Comments » // Communities/Social Networks, Digital Media Marketing, Digital Media Relations, Public Relations, Technology

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 :-)

The Marketing Century – a compilation of expert insight

// February 23rd, 2011 // 2 Comments » // Advertising, Branding, Communities/Social Networks, Digital Media Marketing, Direct Marketing, Public Relations, Technology

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. (more...)

Content – an illustrated history

// January 25th, 2011 // 69 Comments » // Communities/Social Networks, Content, Technology

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 42MB hi-res jpeg format 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. (more...)

Social media measurement – easy once you recognise it’s not

// January 13th, 2011 // 9 Comments » // Communities/Social Networks, Measurement & Analysis, Public Relations

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: (more...)

Book reviews, or what to give a marketing and PR professional for Christmas

// December 19th, 2010 // 2 Comments » // Communities/Social Networks, Digital Media Marketing, Digital Media Relations, Public Relations, Technology, Website/New Media

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. (more...)