Must Read Blogging From Delhi
Paul Holmes is in Delhi this week for the ICCO (International Communications Consultancy Organisation) World Summit, which has brought together some senior public relations people from around the world to discuss “next practices.” His posts are absolutely worth reading. Some of the highlights so far:
- The Disconnect: Peter Verrengia of Fleishman Hillard, talking about evaluation
- From Control to Conversation: Publicis Group PR chairman Lou Capozzi talks about the shift from an age of controlled communication to a new age of conversation… Paul Taaffe of Hill & Knowlton, provides a lively counterpoint. He doesn’t disagree with Lou, but he does question whether any public relations firm — his own included — is ready to step up to the challenge of driving conversations, and doing so in a media neutral way. >> I would also add “client neutral” way.
- A License to Thrill: Harold Burson in his mid 80s is still as spry and engaged as ever… He has interesting things to say about the lack of any institutionalized body of knowledge and therefore of any sense of history, all of which I agree with, but his speech is likely to be remembered for his endorsement of licensing…
Go read and subscribe to The Holmes Report – money well spent.
SlideShare
This is a terrific new service that’s going to solve a major pain point for me – how I share fat .ppt presentations. Love the look and feel and some of the presentations are brilliant.
Evolution of Cisco.com
Cisco’s got a new look and done an upgrade to their site. In a quick vote around the office most didn’t like the new ID but I do – pivots well off the previous look and feel. While the use of blogs, RSS and podcasts is there, I’m surprised they didn’t drive subscriber buttons onto the home page. Seems like an opportunity missed. Same goes for the visibility of blogs and the like.
Buzzlogic Interview
Richard has an interview with Buzzlogic founder Mitch Ratcliffe.
R/WW: Why did you start this company?
It actually began with a question about how to deal with a blogger, from a friend who is the CEO of a public company. I found myself drawing maps to explain not just the connectedness of a blogger to others in the market, but the way that a blog’s influence varies from topic to topic. It was a short step from that to deciding, with Todd Parsons, to start the company in early 2004 – in order to find automated ways of analyzing influence.Basically, I was doing something with those maps that is analogous to building a spreadsheet with pen and paper. There had to be a technological solution to gathering the data and a methodology for processing it into meaningful insight. We started by drawing maps with a project called MyDensity, which let bloggers display a fairly rudimentary social map around their blogs. It got some traction, but we ran through our crawling/hosting capacity without coming up with a business model to support it. That quickly evolved into a business built on providing much more detailed data to paying customers, since the backend processing was awfully expensive. We’ve always been focused on actually building a business, which is why we brought on a team and CEO Rob Crumpler, all who worked for next to nothing while we made progress toward the launch.
Now, the company has built an infrastructure that is both more powerful and much more efficient – so we are able to launch our first product, which is a hosted influence monitoring and tracking service that combines our analysis with tools for interacting with influencers, so that marketers can measure the results.
