The Business of Influence : Let us help you fill in the blanks - create long-term engagement and ROI

Let us help you fill in the blanks

Adding or swapping in social media initiatives will impact .............by ...............extent over...............................time frame. And when this happens the added value for the business will be £...........................which will give me an ROI of .............

TheMarketingblog’s Social Media ROI Plan using LinkedIn Group sites is now producing solid measureable results for businesses like yours.

Talk to us about how it could give you a foothold in the Social Media Stakes and how it could make a worthwhile impact on your bottom line for the rest of this year and into 2012.  Call Will Corry for a preview of how your people could harness the social media stratosphere. Call today 01784 434 412 will@themarketingblog.co.uk
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Philip Sheldrake's The Business of Influence is a useful contribution to the literature on PR, marketing and social media - but above all it adds to the literature on measurement and evaluation.

So how can we measure influence? Sheldrake is broadly impressed with Klout's approach - except that it only works for Twitter and ignores email, blogs, Facebook and other social media engagement.

The point about complexity is well made when he contrasts the simplicity of media evaluation in 1991 with the challenge of media monitoring and evaluation in 2011:

"Where should I listen and how should I make sense of it, and what demands a response and what should I say and when should I say it, and to whom should I say it and where should I say it, and in which format should I say it? When you multiply these possibilities together it becomes immediately clear that you're trying to deal with massive complexity, at least relative to your colleague from 1991."

Influence measurement, he argues, is like weather forecasting. "Just because it's difficult, and because it turns out to me more accurate some times and entirely unpredictable at other times, doesn't mean that it does not have significant value."

The concept of influence is so much broader than the concept of social media. As Sheldrake writes, "I do wonder when the emphasis on 'social' this and 'digital' that might finally die."

It's clearly a problem for marketing, for advertising and for public relations. Sheldrake's solution comes in the form of a Chief Influence Officer, 'the incumbent... charged with making the art and science of influencing and being influenced a core organizational discipline... Ideally, the Chief Influence Officer will have a varied background covering marketing, PR, customer service, HR, product development and operations.'

The author, unsurprisingly, has just such a hybrid background (engineering, marketing, management, public relations). This explains his desire to categorise and enumerate - a useful corrective perhaps to most public relations literature, but an approach that makes for a jerky read.
He's written an interesting book (maybe even an important book), and I do sense agreement around the need to redesign and repurpose public relations. Influence, like engagement, could be a new paradigm.

Talk to us at theMarketingblog about how we could give you a foothold in the Social Media Stakes and how it could make a worthwhile impact on your bottom line for the rest of this year and into 2012. 

Call Will Corry for a preview of how your people could harness the social media stratosphere. Call today 01784 434 412 will@themarketingblog.co.uk