MarCom Professional

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?

Indeed, the Digital Marketing Association simply repeated the news on its website. More...

Friday Roundup 3rd September 2010

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. More...

@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.

My slidestack is embedded here FYI, but before I sign off I should thank David Phillips (@DavidGHPhillips / http://leverwealth.blogspot.com) for his most pertinent and enthusiastic contributions to the discussion. More...

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. More...

Friday Roundup 20th August 2010

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. More...

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: More...

Friday Roundup 6th August 2010

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. More...

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. More...

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. More...

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. More...