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Book launch – Share This: the Social Media Handbook for PR professionals (CIPR)

Last night saw the official launch of Share This: The Social Media Handbook for PR professionals at Google Campus in Bonhill Street, London.  It was the icing on the cake for a great collaborative process that has hopefully delivered something of real value to PR people in the UK. And beyond. CIPR CEO Jane Wilson (see below) revealed last night that the book will be published in the US in August.

Jane Wilson CEO CIPR

Big plaudits also go to my old chum Mr Stephen Waddington (pictured below) for pushing the project forward. Without him, this wouldn’t have seen the light of day. And of course, huge thanks to all of my fellow co-authors who are all, I think, justifiably pleased with the outcome:  Katy HowellSimon SandersHelen NowickaGemma GriffithsBecky McMichaelRobin WilsonAlex LaceyMatt ApplebyDan TyteStephen WaddingtonStuart BruceRob Brown, Russell GoldsmithAdam ParkerJulio RomoPhilip SheldrakeRichard Bagnall,Daljit BhurjiRichard BaileyRachel MillerMark Pack, and Simon Collister.

And in case you were wondering, here’s what we got up to after the launch party – a curry in Brick Lane. Outstanding.

And here’s a quick video of yours truly giving a flavour of one of my chapters in the book: What has Google Ever Done For PR?

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I do hope you’ll buy and read the book. And of course, I think we’d all welcome any feedback!

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Books Digital marketing digital pr online pr tech pr Technology PR

Influence Engine Optimisation (IEO): the future of PR?

(This article first appeared on the CIPR Conversation)

Mark Schaefer’s recently published book – Return on Influence – is a good primer on the emerging world of social scoring. He looks in great depth at the various social scoring platforms such as Klout, Peerindex and Kred as well as some case studies about how brands and individuals are using (and misusing) these new tools.

Schaefer’s view of social scoring seems to be that – love it or loathe it – it isn’t going away.

As he says: “The implication is that a numerical marker of authority such as a Klout score can have a legitimate impact on people’s opinions about status and influence even if the score doesn’t necessarily reflect offline reality or the system can be gamed. The whole philosophy is that your online reputation, or your capacity to influence, your probability to influence, is going to be increasingly defined by metrics. There’s no doubt about that trend.”

He advocates that although Klout and its ilk are by no means perfect, they are getting better all the time. And it ill behooves those in the worlds of PR and marketing to ignore it.

He also has an interesting definition of online influence as measured by Klout. Namely, that a Klout score is a reflection of an individual or brand’s ability to move content and initiate action amongst an online audience.

He uses the example of Justin Bieber. Many critics point to the fact that Bieber has a Klout score of 100. Barack Obama by contrast scores 91. Does that mean the young entertainer is more influential than the President of the United States?

No, says Schaefer. It simply means that Bieber’s ability to move content through his online network is supreme. When he says click, his audience clicks. The President’s audience doesn’t quite respond in the same Pavlovian manner (which may be no bad thing).

Whether you accept this definition of influence, it does perhaps suggest that it would be unwise to dismiss the concept of social scoring out of hand in this context.

But what if we take this a step further. Klout has been described as an Influence Engine. Schaefer muses in the book about the potential rise of “Klout coaches” – individuals or agencies who will provide services to help improve your Klout score. In which case, will we see the emergence of Influence Engine Optimisation consultancies who will perform a similar role to an SEO agency in the world of natural search rankings? Will PR professionals be tasked with managing reputation via influence – and thus turn themselves into Influence Engine Optimisation specialists?

Or is it the case as Brian Solis argues this week that Klout and PeerIndex don’t measure influence at all?  You decide.

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Books Digital marketing digital pr General PR marketing online pr tech pr Technology PR

If PR was no fun in 1985, what is it now?

David Maister’s 1993 book “Managing The Professional Service Firm” is still the gold standard by which all other management books aimed at the legal, accounting, PR, marketing and consulting sectors should be judged.

A round up of material he’d been writing since the early 1980s, re-reading it again reminded me how much truth is still contained within its pages. There is very little that has dated.

Every chapter still contains golden nuggets of wisdom – not just for those in senior management positions in PR firms, but for those who are starting out on their careers.

For example, if you think the “motivation crisis” among the younger generation in PR is a new phenomenon, think again:

“PR is just not any fun any more. Today’s clients are demanding, cynical about the value they receive, and treat you less as a professional and more like an ordinary vendor. The pace, intensity and workload are greater than ever, and the firm atmosphere is competitive rather than supportive, and certainly less collegial. With all this concern about profitability, it seems like we’re being asked to work even harder for less money.”

And that was in 1985!

However, if the issue hasn’t gone away, then the solution offered 25 years ago is broadly similar. In other words, the problem isn’t one of too much work, but too much meaningless work. The role of management is to explain why work is important rather than just telling people what needs to be done. In addition, it is a function of the knowledge and skills that the firm has to offer that will give it the best chance of long term success. As Maister says, knowledge and skills are assets that left untended will depreciate in value. And quickly. And perhaps even more so in this day and age.

The PR sector as a whole clearly needs to invest in developing new knowledge and skills.

The future is bleak for those who continue milking yesterday’s assets.

 

 

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Books Web/Tech

“We’re Swayed by Confidence More than Expertise”: Predictably Irrational: Blog Archive

Good post from Dan Ariely on new research that seems to show we tend to seek advice from experts who exhibit the most confidence – even when we know they haven’t been particularly accurate in the past.

Posted via web from Andrew’s posterous

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Books Digital marketing digital pr General PR online pr tech pr Technology PR

“Insecure, threatened, worried, exposed, skeptical, suspicious”: How PR buyers feel

PR buyers are worried, concerned, suspicious

David Maister’s book Managing The Professional Service Firm remains the gold standard text on the subject, some 16 years after it was first published. In fact, the book is a collection of essays and articles that he had written over previous years, stretching as far back as 1982.

The main thing that struck me about re-reading this again recently was how little things have changed in terms of the major issues still impacting professional service firms of all kinds – everyone from lawyers, accountants, consultants and, of course, PR agencies. For example, he cited systemic under delegation as a key problem back in the early 1980s – and nearly 30 years later, it continues to plague the PR business.

As Maister notes in his chapter on the Motivation Crisis: “It is not uncommon to hear comments such as ‘The practice of law [or accounting or PR consulting] is just not as fun any more. Today’s clients are demanding, cynical about the value they receive, and treat you less as a professional and more like an ordinary vendor. The pace, intensity and workload are greater than ever, and the firm atmosphere is competitive rather than supportive and certainly less collegial. With all this concern about profitability, it seems like we’re being asked to work even harder for what might turn out to be less money.”

And Maister wrote this in 1985!

There isn’t a chapter in the book that doesn’t have something of key relevance to everyone working in a PR firm today. Chapter 10 on How Client’s Choose is a good example:

“Buying professional services is rarely a comfortable experience,” says Maister. He goes on to list 10 unpleasant emotions associated with the experience (I’ve editorialised slightly from the original):

  1. I’m feeling insecure, I’m not sure I know how to detect which of the agencies pitching to me is the genius and which is just good. I’ve exhausted my abilities to make a technical distinction.
  2. I’m feeling threatened. This is my area of responsibility and even though intellectually I know I need outside expertise, emotionally it’s not comfortable to put my affairs in the hands of others
  3. I’m taking a personal risk. By putting my affairs in the hands of others, I risk losing control
  4. I’m impatient. I didn’t call in someone at the first sign of symptoms. I’ve been thinking about this for a while.
  5. I’m worried. By the very fact of suggesting improvements or changes, these people are implying I haven’t been doing it right up until now. Are they on my side?
  6. I’m exposed. Whoever I hire, I’m going to have to reveal some proprietary secrets – not all of which is flattering. I will have to undress.
  7. I’m feeling ignorant – and I don’t like it. I don’t know if I’ve got a simple problem or a complex one – do I trust these PR folk to be honest about that?
  8. I’m skeptical. I’ve been burned by PR agencies before. You get a lot of promises. How do I know whose promises to buy?
  9. I’m concerned that they either won’t or can’t take the time to understand what makes my situation special. They’ll try to sell me what they’ve got rather than what I need.
  10. I’m suspicious. Will they be those typical professionals who are hard to get hold of, who are patronizing, who leave you out of the loop, who befuddle you with jargon, who don’t explain what they are doing or why, who…., ……who? In short, will these people deal with me in the way I want to be dealt with?

If PR clients felt this way 20 years ago, think how they feel now.

Remember, it may be painful to walk in the other person’s shoes. But David Maister’s advice is as true now as it was 30 years ago: “The single most important talent in selling professional services is the ability to understand the purchasing process (not the sales process) from the client’s perspective. The better a professional can learn to think like a client, the easier it will be to do and say the correct things to get hired.”

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Books digital pr online pr tech pr Technology PR

Social norms versus market norms: implications for social media and online PR

Dan Ariely’s book Predictably Irrational is a fascinating look at why human beings systematically behave in an irrational fashion.  Ariely is a behavioural economist – he goes a long way to exploding the traditional rational expectation theory of economics. The subject titles of the chapters in the book immediately give you a flavour of the non-intuitive findings of his research. For example:

The Cost of Zero Cost – why we often pay too much when we pay nothing

In one experiment, a group of people were offered the choice of receiving a $10 Amazon voucher for free – or paying $7 for a $20 voucher. Under rational expectation theory, everyone should choose the $20 option. Because the overall gain is $13 versus $10. However, in the test, virtually everyone in the group picked the free $10 option.  The power of free is very powerful  (but says Ariely, irrational).

However, one particular chapter struck me as having major implications for social media – namely, The Cost of Social Norms. According to Ariely, we live simultaneously in two different worlds – one where social norms prevail, and the other where market norms make the rules. Social norms are usually warm and fuzzy. Market norms are very different. The exchanges are sharp-edged: wages, prices, rents, interest, and costs/benefits.  Says Ariely “when we keep social norms and market norms on their separate paths, life hums along pretty well. However, when social and market norms collide, trouble sets in.” Take sex as an example. A guy takes a girl out for dinner on three occasions and pays for the meal every time. On the fourth date, he casually mentions how much this romance is costing him. “Now he’s crossed the line. Violation! She calls him a beast and storms off. He should have remembered the immortal words of Woody Allen – the most expensive sex is free sex”.

Introducing market norms into social exchanges thus violates social norms and hurts relationships. Once this type of mistake has been made, recovering a social relationship is difficult.

So what does this mean for the world of social media? More specifically for those who hope to use social media for commercial benefit? If Ariely is right, then you need to understand very clearly where the boundaries lie between social and market norms.  As a PR, is it possible to apply both social and market norms to your relationship with a journalist? Ultimately, you are being paid by a client to achieve a certain commercial goal ie you’d think market norms would apply every time. Yet much of the talk around social media seems to be couched in warm, fuzzy terms like conversation, dialogue and engagement. PRs are forever talking up their special “relationships” with journalists. However, in a business context, surely market norms must apply at some point.

In another of Ariely’s experiments, people didn’t mind doing certain tasks for free – because it was seen as a social norm. The minute money was involved, market norms came into play – and people’s involvement and behaviour changed. On Twitter, can you switch from providing good info with no expectation of financial reward to pimping your own commercial interests?

Getting the balance right between social and market norms is thus going to be one of the trickiest challenges facing social media marketeers.

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Books digital pr General PR marketing online pr tech pr Technology PR

Wittgenstein’s Poker: Why defining social media and PR won’t solve its problems

For those of a philosophic bent, one of the best books of recent times has been Wittgenstein’s Poker, by David Edmonds and John Eidinow, which provides a brilliant overview of two giants of 20th century thought, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper. (The title derives from the infamous meeting of Wittgenstein and Popper in room H3, King’s College Cambridge on 25th October 1946 when Wittgenstein allegedly brandished a hot poker at Popper over a fundamental philosophical disagreement.

The dispute between Wittgenstein and Popper represents the major clash of philosophical opinion in the 20th century. In simple terms (if that is possible), Wittgenstein felt that philosophical problems were merely puzzles caused by the misuse of language. By analysing our use of language properly, we would dissolve away the issues. Popper violently disagreed with this view. For him, there were real problems, not mere puzzles that could be just explained away by language analysis. For Popper, Wittgenstein’s theories were the equivalent of intellectual navel gazing. And he was backed up in this by Bertrand Russell (who ironically was one of Wittgenstein’s early supporters). As Edmonds and Eidinow describe: “Russell had pioneered the analysis of concepts, and, like Popper, thought that this could often clarify issues. But also like Popper he believed precision was not the be-all and end-all. Popper pointed out that scientists managed to accomplish great things despite working with a degree of linguistic ambiguity. Russell averred that problems would not disappear even if each word were carefully defined.

By way example, Russell used the following anecdote. He was cycling to Winchester and stopped to ask a shopkeeper the shortest way. The shopkeeper called to a man in the back of the premises:

“Gentleman wants to know the shortest way to Winchester”

“Winchester?” an unseen voice replied.

“Aye.”

“Way to Winchester?”

“Aye.”

“Shortest way?”

Aye.

“Dunno”

The connection with today’s social media and PR world is that I keep seeing a lot of Socratic questions being asked eg What is PR? What is social media? The underlying implication being that if we could simply define what social media and PR are then we are well on the way to promised land. However, I’m with Popper and Russell. We can spend our time defining terms all we like – the problems to be solved won’t go away. Namely, how can we best solve client’s marketing and PR problems for them in a profitable manner. Continuing to obsess over definitions isn’t going to help.

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Books digital pr General PR marketing online pr tech pr Technology PR Web/Tech

“Should I kill myself or read another Twitter message?”: Camus’ question for the social media generation

The above quote is a reworking of Albert “The Outsider” Camus’ existentialist poser: “Should I kill myself or have a cup of coffee?” It is referred to in Barry Schwartz’s highly insightful cult classic, The Paradox of Choice to stress the point that everything in life is a choice. One of the key themes in Schwartz’s book is that although having no choice at all is a bad thing, having an ever expanding growth in choice isn’t leading us to the promised land either.

In other words, choice overload is an even more serious problem them information overload. And choice overload is clearly in abundance in the world of PR, marketing and social media – whether it is the range of marketing channels available (and ways in which these can be combined), or the number of 3rd party agencies and suppliers queuing up to offer their services to the deluged client side buyers.

As Schwartz says: “Filtering out extraneous information is one of the basic functions of consciousness. If everything available to our senses demanded our attention at all times, we wouldn’t be able to get through the day.” (He has clearly never used Twitter).

We are becoming trapped by what economist Fred Hirch has referred to as “the tyranny of small decisions” (or in social media terms, the Tyranny of the Twitter Stream or the infinitely expanding Google Reader RSS subscription list). According to Clay Shirky, there is no such thing as information overload, merely “filter failure.” If that is true, then we just need to build better filters. But presumably building better filters requires us to be more clear and decisive about our goals. And as Schwartz fascinatingly points out: “Goal setting and decision making begins with the question, ‘What do I want?”. But knowing what we want means being able to anticipate accurately how one choice or another will make us feel, and that is no easy task.” A number of experiments cited show that our predictions about how we will feel about our goal making decisions are usually wrong. “Susceptibility to error can only get worse as the number and complexity of decisions increase, which in general describes the conditions of daily life. The growth of options and opportunities for choice has three, related unfortunate effects:

It means that decisions require more effort

It makes mistakes more likely

It makes the psychological consequences of mistakes more severe

Another key element of the book is the distinction between people who are maximisers and satisficers. “Choosing wisely begins with developing a clear understanding of your goals. And the first choice you must make is between the goal of choosing the absolute best and the goal of choosing something that is good enough”.

If you seek and accept only the best, you are a maximiser. Maximisers need to be “assured that every decision was the best that could be made. Yet how can anyone truly know that any given option is absolutely the best possible? The only way is to check out all the alternatives. As a decision strategy, maximising creates a daunting task, which becomes all the more daunting as the number of options increases.”

Take some social media examples. A Twitter maximiser will presumably keep following more people and reading more Tweets in order to reassure themselves they have found the absolute best in terms of Twitterers and material. They will click every link they can to make sure they haven’t missed that vital blog post or news story. Or what about a client side PR director who in order to reassure themselves they have chosen the right agency will keep adding to the pitch list until they have 20 agencies lined up (as Schwartz points out, the more alternatives you consider the more likely you are to suffer from buyer’s remorse and still feel disatisfied with your decision – he cites a number of experiments which seem to verify this principle – at last, scientific proof of the ineffectiveness of lengthy pitch lists!) He has a lot more to say on maximisers, but one of the key conclusions is that maximisers tend to be unhappier people – and unhappy people tend to be poor decision makers.

Contrast this with “satisficers”. To satisfice is to settle for something that is “good enough” and not worry about the possibility that there might be something better. A satisficer has criteria and standards. He or she will search until they find the item (whatever it is) that meets those standards and at that point stop. They are not concerned that a better alternative might be just around the corner.

I could go on, but I’m making a decision to stop now and go and do something else instead. Suffice to say there is a lot be learnt from The Paradox of Choice – and I shall return to it again in later blog posts.

So. Should I follow yet another person on Twitter? Spend another few minutes on Tweetdeck? Or kill myself? Or go an re-read some Camus?

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Books digital pr General PR marketing Media online pr tech pr Technology PR Web/Tech

Why you should read Antony Mayfield’s e-book Brands In Networks

First, my thanks to Mr Stephen Waddington for flagging Antony Mayfield’s e-book, Brands In Networks.

As Wadds says “publishers, journalists, PRs and marketing professionals that are looking for a pragmatic analysis of the fragmentation of the media industry should download the 50-page eBook immediately.”

I agree. The book covers a huge amount of ground – and I have to admire the time and effort that Antony has put into writing it. Given one of the key themes of the book is around the subject of attention markets, he has succeeded brilliantly in gaining much of mine this morning.

Rather than a formal critique of the book, I have pulled out below some of the key points that struck me on first reading with my own initial comments.

Antony Mayfield: The numbers

1.4 billion (one-fifth of the world’s population) people online in the world today.

400 Million of them are members of social networks.

There are over a trillion web pages indexed by google.

There are 112.8 Million blogs being tracked by specialist search
engine Technorati.

10 Hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.

In 2008, for the first time, the volume of internet traffic generated by consumers will overtake that created by corporations and other organisations.

Andrew Bruce Smith: And while we are on the numbers, let’s not forget the billions of e-mails and text messages sent every day.

AM: Any one of the 1.4 billion of us who is connected to the web can create content. from basic, written-word web pages, via interactive blogs and forums with podcasts, through to videos and pictures and endless commentary from us, and from anyone else in the network.

ABS: We can – but we don’t. As per the recent Rubicon Consulting report: “community experts have been aware of this phenomenon for years, calling it “participation inequality.” Jakob Nielsen wrote an influential article on the subject in 2006, describing the “90-9-1 rule”. It states:

• “90% of users are lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don’t contribute).
• “9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their
time.
• “1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions: it can seem
as if they don’t have lives because they often post just minutes after whatever
event they’re commenting on occurs.”

The 10pc of “Most Frequent Contributors” are also the biggest influencers in these communities says Rubicon. The logical assumption is that PR might want to assume a role in becoming MFCs – however, frequency needs to be tempered with issues of trust and value.

AM: Prediction: expect to see the first major global brand appoint a digital agency as its agency of recordin the next year.

ABS: Agreed. The recent Sapient survey bears this out.

AM: Email: you can send content or alerts to people’s inboxes. email is already so
embedded in our lives that it doesn’t feel like a revolutionary medium, but it is.

ABS: Jason Baer recently shared the following in relation to e-mail:

1. 21% of email recipients report email as Spam, even if they know it isn’t

2. 43% of email recipients click the Spam button based on the email “from” name or email address

3. 69% of email recipients report email as Spam based solely on the subject line

4. 35% of email recipients open email based on the subject line alone

5. IP addresses appearing on just one of the 12 major blacklists had email deliverability 25 points below those not listed on any blacklists

6. Email lists with 10% or more unknown users get only 44% of their email delivered by ISPs

7. 17% of Americans create a new email address every 6 months

8. 30% of subscribers change email addresses annually

9. If marketers optimized their emails for image blocking, ROI would increase 9+%

10. 84% of people 18-34 use an email preview pane

11. People who buy products marketed through email spend 138% more than people that do not receive email offers

12. 44% of email recipients made at least one purchase last year based on a promotional email

13. Subscribers below age 25 prefer SMS to email

14. 35% of business professionals check email on a mobile device

15. 80% of social network members have received unsolicited email or invites

Draw your own conclusions.

AM: RSS feeds allow people to subscribe to websites and have new
content sent to them via their inbox, a newsreader like google reader, or a widget
sitting on their computer desktop. RSS means that none of the people who enjoy
my fabulous Cat has to remember to check your website everyday to see if there is
new information: they wait for the RSS tool to bring your cat articles to them. This is
the same distribution method that powers audio and video podcasts.

ABS: Adam Parker of WebITPR recently argued that RSS subscribers now numbered around 100 million – hardly a niche any more.

AM: Anyone – brand, media owner or individual – looking to thrive online would do well to
understand how networks work, where their own are and how they fit into them.
for networks are how the online world works and they are the essence of the
revolution that we are living through. Crucially, to succeed in networks we sometimes need to move away from thinking about promotion or selling as the key activity. a selling message pushed uninvited into a social space is rarely useful, and rarely welcome. brands that do this are ignored if
they are lucky, and may find themselves on the sharp end of criticism from blogs and
forums if they aren’t. Once we have understood our networks we need to ask: “What is a valid role for us here?” and: “how can we add value?”

ABS: No doubt brand owners are also asking what (financial) value the network can give back to them in return for adding value. Cracking the transactional element of these relationships is going to be key.

Also, the Rubicon Consulting report had a very good analysis of the varying types of network and community:

“The survey showed that different types of online communities have very different user
bases and rates of usage. Although many observers speak of web community as if it’s
a single thing, in reality there is incredible diversity between communities.
Approaches that work well in one type of community may fail utterly in another. That
means companies looking to found community sites, or partner with them, need to
understand what kind of community they are engaging with.

Every community is unique, but they can be grouped into five broad categories, based
on the motivations of the people who participate in them. The five major types of
communities are:
• Proximity, where users share a geographic location (Craigslist is an example);
• Purpose, where they share a common task (eBay, Wikipedia);
• Passion, where they share a common interest (YouTube, Dogster);
• Practice, where they share a common career or field of business (many online
professional groups fall in this category); and
• Providence, where they discover connections with others (Facebook).

AM: We sometimes like to think that in digital marketing we have developed a new
discipline, but coming to this sector from the outside two years ago it looked to me
like an awful lot of agencies had taken ad agency models and simply transplanted
them to the web. Many laugh at the “brochure-ware” websites of the late 90s – where
people had literally taken the marketing literature formats of the print age and put
them online – but in many ways we have only progressed a small distance in terms of
understanding the way the web works. I
t is my contention that marketing needs to be rethought in almost every aspect. Even if there are things worth keeping, nothing should be exempt from the challenge:

ABS: Totally agree. We have barely scratched the surface.

AM: Our language gives us away. Think of the way we talk about the people we are marketing to, and what we want to do in a channel media context. People, individuals, are masked and herded into demographics that gloss over the complexity of the situation. We talk about consumers, audiences; passive terms. We talk about message penetration, or buying eyeballs. When you start to think about things from the perspective of networks, this language jars. People don’t consume content: they read it or watch it, and then often do things with it such as remixing, forwarding, or linking to it. These aren’t audiences or eyeballs. These are individuals. A lot of the language of channel media marketing sounds militaristic. We monitor (from on high) consumer behaviours. We penetrate markets. We dominate mindshare. We execute campaigns. These aren’t social words. They come from the mass; the industrial level – whereas in the networks we must operate (as we do in our personal lives) at a human level.

ABS: As an Orwellist, I completely subscribe to the view that language shapes our view of the world. Part of the challenge is being able to articulate the value of these new approaches to an audience that is still steeped in the language (and ideas) of an older era.

AM: When we think about attention markets, we should ask; who are our competitors?
They may be different from the people we compete with in our primary commercial
marketplaces – they may include media, social media, or other brands.
Taking full account of the market means properly understanding our brands’
networks, how they operate as markets, and how we can be effective in them. That
means not just having a handful of insights and a great one-at-a-time creative idea. it
means being able to listen closely and respond. it means having several competing
strategies and waiting for one to stand out, then having the resource to back it
up quickly.

ABS: Agreed. Parallel marketing will trump linear marketing.

AM: (In relation to Ted Rheingold’s Dogster site): Suddenly, it seemed, the failure rate for projects began to increase. When a review of projects that were failing was conducted, a common factor was quickly spotted:
almost all of the failing projects had taken six months or more from idea to public release.
They were failing because the community had moved on; was interested in other things. Their needs had shifted. Ted calls this effect: the impact horizon. ever since, he has been working on bringing down the development time for new features to as close to a month as possible.

ABS: Speed rules everywhere. In marketing and PR, developing a test and learn mindset is key. In other words, lots of rapidly implemented small scale projects versus big bang campaigns. Implications for agency structure and resourcing.

AM: At iCrossing we talk about “designed-in measurement” for creative and content.
Thinking about measurement begins at the discovery phase, and it should be
implemented and remain live throughout a given project. measurement gives us
insight and evidence for refining every aspect of a programme – from search terms to
page design – almost from day one. This is a departure from the ‘build it and leave it’
approach that online marketers often take to building beautiful microsites, and then
tacking on some weak analytics measurement at the end.

ABS: Agreed. PR still hasn’t quite grasped the measurement nettle yet.

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Books People

Dan Roam and the 21st century feedback loop

How’s this for a piece of zeitgeist?

I posted yesterday about Dan Roam’s book The Back of the Napkin. Overnight, he picks up a Google Alert about my blog post and in turn, comments – and posts a very nice response in return.

Might need to look at updating my sketch to map the ongoing impact….