MarCom Professional

Friday Roundup 26th February 2010

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. More...

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. More...

The Friday Roundup featuring the Semantic Web

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. More...

The Friday Roundup featuring the New Rules

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. More...

The Friday Roundup featuring the Forget Web

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. More...

Friday Roundup 18th December 2009

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... More...

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.

[Click the link to the right under "Attached Files" for a larger version of the graphic.]

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. More...

The Friday Roundup 4th December 2009

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". More...

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. More...

Friday Roundup 20th November 2009

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). More...