MarCom Professional

What a lovely thing to see at the start of the New Year, particularly this one! A photo of a loved tabby cat under the word "Found" rather than "Lost".

And a thank you message to neighbours for the help they may have given in recovering said cat... I knew immediately that I'd take a picture of it and write a blog post.

Why?

Why did the cat's owner feel compelled to go back to her PC, bring up the "Lost" file, edit to "Found", print it, go outside and staple it to the tree? On the face of it, he or she obviously really loves that cat and might not have had anything else to do with her time... More...

Friday Roundup 19th December 2008

The last Roundup of 2008 includes a diverse array of pressies under the MarCom Professional tree.

Brian Solis and Ben Matthews scrutinise the Techcrunch embargoe kerfuffle (marking the end of an era?), David Knowles chats about how we might all learn from the latest X-factor, and Stephen Waddington uses any excuse to include a picture of Kelly Brooks... although we agree Quick Response codes might be hot stuff in coming years.

And in amongst the brightly wrapped pressies, one from the US Air Force, courtesy of David Meerman Scott, about their use of social media in their marketing communications. More...

Friday Roundup 12th December 2008

Before we dive into this week's MarCom Professional highlights, we'd like you to help us work out what we should be doing for you in the New Year. Here's the shortlist:

A. An agency time planning, logging and reporting tool. Keep track of projects, people, tasks, time. Work out where you're over- and under-servicing, and opt-in to anonymised benchmarkcomparisons.

B. Coverage collation, management and measurement. Scan coverage and capture screenshots directly to the browser, generate reports and share with your team and/or clients in your own extranet. More...

I'm presenting in one hour to the European Agenda Setting Conference on the impact of the social Web. Great presentations this morning from Roland Schatz, President Media Tenor, David W Moore, author of The Opinion Makers, and Ramu Damudaran, Director Civil Society at the United Nations.

Here's my deck if you're interested:

Balance is always a difficult thing to achieve. Whilst the digerati sometimes look down their noses at the masses, much like bankers once did in financial times of yore, they are likely to be as much one side of 'the balance' as the others. Yes, they might still be languishing on IE6 using Favorites rather than Firefox 3 and Delicious, but are they happy?

Here's one songster's take:

Andrew Smith tickled my fractal with his post yesterday "Where are the PR Numerati?" (and here on MarCom Professional). Why? Because he's right and I'm numerate and I'm in PR. His post was prompted by the August 2008 book "The Numerati" by senior Business Week writer Stephen Baker.

Public relations had been boiled down to a very simple process by the end of the 1990s. Journalists write the papers and magazines the public reads. The PRs know the journalists. The clients retain the PR professionals.

That simple world is no more. I don't mean that traditional media relations no longer exists, only that it is now just a sub-set of a far more complex map of exerting influence.  The best PR professionals will: More...

It's good to talk. The more people can reach out and find the right people and organisations to relate to, to discuss the issues important to them, to learn, to hang out and have fun, to contribute content and opinion and ideas, then the more satisfying they will find being part of society. I’m no sociologist, but it sounds like a good heuristic to me.

I stand by the assertion in my ebook on Social Web Analytics: “Ultimately, the Social Web has revolutionised communications massively and irrevocably, to the benefit of the consumer, the adaptive and agile organisation, and those who cherish an open society.”

Organisations’ engagement with the Social Web is still sufficiently nascent that it offers earlier adopters competitive advantage. More...

I received three emails on the back of my post last week "When the going gets tough, the tough get communicating - or why the tough need muscles". I guess getting emails rather than comments underlines the more private nature of such discussions. The post finished by promising to come back with "ways to get your marketing communications to the gym", and that's the subject here.

If you have a good personal trainer, what do they do for you? They bring discipline. They set targets and encourage you to meet them. They don't waste your time with activity that doesn't contribute to hitting those targets. More...

Times are hard. It appears that the people running our financial systems lost control. And whilst the pundits argue the difference between high finance and the so-called "real economy", your investors, your shareholders, will be demanding to know how your board is going to respond to scenarios including zero revenue growth and revenue decline in 2009.

When the going gets tough, the tough get communicating.

Here's a few thoughts regarding the criticality of public relations in recessionary periods.

Firstly, the paragraph above points out that your stakeholders will want to know what you're planning and how you're doing against that plan, so attenuating your organisation's ability to both listen and respond isn't going to help any. More...

Let me show you an image and ask you some questions. Do complete the questionnaire and all will be revealed later at the end of this post!

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You might have established that I am not a qualified automotive designer, researcher or marketer.  But what do you do when you do want to know answers to questions like these?

Enter Amazon 's Mechanical Turk service.

Their FAQs describe the service as follows: