MarCom Professional

Social capital: the new currency of the social economy?

I’ll be co-presenting the workshop with Grant Whiteside, the Technical Director at Ambergreen Internet Marketing.  As a pioneer in the UK Search Marketing industry, Grant  has over a decade of hard-won experience under his belt in this dynamic sector. He is highly respected throughout the industry with experience across a wide range of industry sectors including B2B, Charity, Financial Services, Retail, Online Gaming, Hotels, Travel & Leisure and Recruitment. More...

PR and the search for meaning: Web 3.0

I make no apologies for giving airtime this week to a post from my co-moderator Philip Sheldrake on the subject of Web 3.0 and the semantic web. As he says: "Web 3.0 is a majorly significant part of why PR is about to change again, and just as radically."

Web 3.0 (or the semantic web) will embed the concept of meaning at the heart of communication - and rather than fail to do justice to Phil's ideas in a short e-mail, I suggest you just go and read it.

Elsewhere this week, Stephen Waddington refers us to the use of Google Insight to predict company revenues.

Is PR nothing more than 3rd rate e-mail marketing?

Two years ago, I wrote a blog post in which I opined that "many PR companies seem to treat press releases and media relations as a form of direct marketing – and do it in such a way that even a 3rd rate direct marketing agency would be embarrassed by. Bog standard things like opt-in, unsubscribe, data protection standards, etc, seem to be resolutely ignored by many. How long can this behaviour last?"

Quite a while it would seem. The hoary old chestnut of PR spam reared its ugly head again this week with the launch of Realwire's Inconvenient PR Truth Campaign and the usual hand wringing from the PR fraternity. More...

Why are marketing services businesses hopeless at selling?

Engagement, attribution, intent, influence: the marketing lexicon of 2010

Happy New Year. It is clear that the massive changes wrought in marketing communications over the last few years will continue unabated in 2010.

In particular, the slippery concepts of engagement, attribution, intent and influence will occupy everyone on the agency side as well as the clients we serve.

Gord Hotchkiss of Enquiro posted last year about a new way to think about atttribution. He referred to web analytics guru Avinash Kaushik who said much of the thinking around attribution is "complete and utter garbage. Most marketers suck at attribution. More...