The Business of Influence: Reframing Marketing and PR for the Digital Age

The Questions This Book Seeks to Answer

In rethinking the modern processes of influence, we address four big questions:

1. Following the rise of social media, how can we make sense of the noise in our marketplace to help us to achieve our objectives and beat our competitors?

2. How should the influence processes permeate the organization more systematically and measurably, accruing its practitioners more authority and accountability in the boardroom?

3. What big trends must everyone in the business of influence get to grips with?

4. Who does this stuff? What traits and skills are demanded of the modern practitioner?

Let’s take a very brief look at each question:

Q1. Following the rise of social media, how can we make sense of the noise in our marketplace to help us to achieve our objectives and beat our competitors?

Social media has ascended so quickly that today only a minority media remain without a social component. The Six Influence Flows™ provides a new model for the ways in which the motivating and deterring influence factors go around and come around, addressing every stakeholder – a model that can then inform your organization’s structural and cultural design.

We review the current state of integrated marketing communications and the latest and imminent innovations in social Web analytics. We introduce the ethics of analytics, and make the argument that you should invest as much resource into being influenced as you dedicate to influencing others – after all, improving ...