Friday Roundup 5th March 2010

Social capital: the new currency of the social economy?

Brian Solis has a very good piece this week on the subject of social capital. As he says: “Reputation, trust, and relationships, are each earned at varying levels, through our action and words.” (On the subject of words, a simple analysis of the language used by PR Week over the last 15 years shows an industry obsessed with pitches and “raising profile” with little attention to business outcomes).

As Solis continues: “Our interaction reinforces impressions and engenders experiences. As such, our personal and professional brands are essentially reflections of our contributions. In the end, we get out of it, what we invest in it.”

To maintain Solis’ financial analogy, another major challenge for organisations is attempting to accurately work out what level and kind of investment they should make in social capital, what is a “good” return, and how do they identify the partners who will be best able to deliver that return.

On the subject of contributions to social capital, I'd urge readers to a look at the In Vince Cable We Trust campaign. Irrespective of party political allegiance, Vince looks to be the only serious candidate for the next Chancellor. If nothing else, this could be a defining time for social media in the UK.

Have a great weekend.

Best regards, Andrew Bruce Smith and the MarCom Professional team.

Why prospects hide and how to overcome

by Rebecca Caroe of Creative Agency Secrets

Image via Wikipedia We have been members of BIMA for a while – it’s a trade body for digital agencies. They ran an event called “New business generation – farming style” earlier this month. It was a panel discussion with Chris Cowpe – The Caffeine Partnership, Paul Kirkley – JWT, David Hart – Codegent and Mark Clark – @JFDI.

Here is Jane’s take on the event with her own views expanded.

Changes in Business Development

A subtle yet important shift is starting to change the way we look at business development. More...

Something's Gotta Give!

by Trevor Young PR Warrior of Parkyoung

One of the side-effects of social media has been the amplification of public suspicion (criticism?) of major companies and brands.

Here's a slide I have been using in my presentations of late. Depending on the audience, the content of this slide generally hits home pretty hard.

What we have is a situation whereby companies are obsessed with pushing their message out in to the marketplace.

On the other hand, people aren't that interested - ever-growing numbers of consumers do not want to be on the receiving end of inane, incessant chest-beating ads and corporate collateral materials. More...

Social Capital: The Currency of the Social Economy

by Brian Solis of PR 2.0

The convention for creating financial opportunities is evolving and changing the way we seed prospects, promote our expertise and prowess, and connect with those who can help us learn and advance through the facilitation of strategic and mutually beneficial alliances.

Digital capitalization is laying a foundation for expanding the need to cultivate and participate, not only in the real world, but also in the online networks and communities that can benefit us personally and professionally.

In an era of democratized publishing and equalized influence, it can be said that engagement and participation are a new, powerful and effective form of “un” More...

Google knows more about you than your friends and family

by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications

Consumers are no longer characterised by demographic thanks to search marketing. Instead they are defined by interest. Search allows motivated users to be matched with a brand. This was the view of Colin Petrie-Norris, Managing Director, International Specific Media, speaking at the FT Digital Media & Broadcasting conference this morning.

Petrie-Norris shared a list of items that he’d searched for in the last few days with the audience. These included a number of innocent items intended as gifts that he said that he would rather not share with his wife to make the point that Google knows more about a user than their friends and family. More...

PR Week League Tables: stand up and be counted – the industry needs you

by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications

PR Week has extended the deadline for its Top UK Consultancies League Table. Speed submitted its numbers last week. March 2009 saw Speed created from the five PR agencies owned by Loewy. The headline number of the sum of the parts is more than 30 per cent down as a result of less than a handful of client decisions to cut budgets.

But we remain adamant that it was the right year to pursue the strategy we did to build Speed around a fragmented media proposition. The new business has scale, is strong and fit for purpose – More...

PR doesn’t care about business outcomes: what PR Week’s internal search function tells you about the industry

by Andrew Smith of escherman

PR Week’s web site has a very useful search box that tells you which articles contain certain keyword phrases. It also helpfully breaks out what kind of article the phrase was contained in and the year. As a result, it provides a useful measure as to how the interests of the PR sector are reflected in the actual words used by PR Week journalists. And perhaps indicates why PR still isn’t taken as seriously as it might be. For example, the word “pitch” has appeared in nearly 8000 articles since 1995. Unsurprisingly, the number of articles about pitching or pitches rises in line with a recessionary year eg 2001 and 2008. More...

Why brands should write Facebook Fan Page Guidelines

by Tia Fisher of eModeration Blog

In my role as a Senior Account Manager at eModeration, I work with a lot of Facebook Fan Pages. The 'must have' social media marketing item of the moment, they can be tricky devils to moderate, and that's why I was really pleased to come across this post by Nicole Landguth of Ogilvy PR, suggesting more of a two-way engagement with the fans via a full use of the avenues available on Facebook - for example, the Info tab, perfect as a customer service gateway, and (even more soothing to my internal raving) a clear explanation of page guidelines. More...

Belgian Agency Pitch Strike – could it happen here?

by Rebecca Caroe of Creative Agency Secrets

There’s a great summary of the pro and anti arguments about the Belgian Agency strike over on e-consultancy’s site. The comments are helpful including ones from client and agency side folk.

I particularly liked Neale Gilhooley’s comment

My career path has been 90% Agency and 10% Client, but the 10% has radically changed my views on how Agencies should service their Clients.

Agencies are not all the same and as a former Client I have seen many agencies presentations, largely falling into 2 categories: More...