Philip Sheldrake

Content Marketing Show 2012

// November 20th, 2012 // 4 Comments » // Content

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

Share This: The Social Media Handbook for PR, by the CIPR Social Media Panel

// July 9th, 2012 // No Comments » // Communities/Social Networks, Content, Digital Media Relations, Measurement & Analysis, Public Relations, Technology, Website/New Media

After three months of social collaboration involving two dozen authors, we're just a few days away from publishing Share This: The Social Media Handbook for PR (Amazon UK). The authors, all members of the CIPR Social Media panel or friends of, decided that that there was a need for a handbook that covers the full gamut of issues facing the PR practitioner in 2012.

Incredibly, Lord Sugar provides the endorsement for the front cover :-)

I'm delighted to have authored two of the chapters, Chapter 17 on real-time public relations, and the final chapter looking at the future, beyond social media.

Here's the introductory video featuring CIPR CEO Jane Wilson, and then the Table of Contents. Read the CIPR's press release here. Pre-order your copy today!

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‘Earned media’ is not a synonym for public relations

// April 22nd, 2012 // 6 Comments » // Advertising, Content, Customer service, Digital Media Marketing, Public Relations, Website/New Media

"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." (more...)

Interview with Carla Buzasi, Editor-in-Chief, Huffington Post UK

// October 17th, 2011 // No Comments » // Content, Public Relations, Website/New Media

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.

Don’t forward. That could be illegal.

// July 30th, 2011 // No Comments » // Content, Website/New Media

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. (more...)

Taptu for iPad – with gorgeous illustration

// April 14th, 2011 // No Comments » // Content, Technology, Website/New Media

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?

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Radian6 and the Insights Platform – getting semantic

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

Content – an illustrated history

// January 25th, 2011 // 70 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...)

It’s all about curation

// December 10th, 2010 // No Comments » // Communities/Social Networks, Content, Public Relations, Technology

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. (more...)

Conversations start with something interesting to say delivered in an interesting way – Part 3

// March 22nd, 2009 // 2 Comments » // Consumer & FMCG, Content, Digital Media Marketing, Public Relations

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. (more...)