Sky - please stop spamming me

I guess it's a year since I switched from Virgin to Sky. The programming is great. The customer service, the initial broadband quality/speed, and their personal/data management is terrible.

The reason I know a year is up I've had letters and calls from a number of companies asking me telling me my 12 month warranty is up, and asking if I'd like their own insurance. I've started to get much ruder in my response.

But Sky - why, oh why have you given all of my personal details (including my mobile phone number!) to God knows who? When did I ever give you permission to do so - I really don't think I did? And how can I stop these people from selling it on to whoever wants it?

Any thoughts welcome.

Edelman's Distributed Influence report

I read Quantifying the Impact of Social Media over the weekend, Jonny Bentwood's summary of a round table of the great and the good last July - a follow-up from last year's paper with David Brain. This one collated thoughts from the great and good:

Jeff Jarvis, Buzzmachine
Steve Rubel, me2revolution
Keith O’Brien, PRWeek
Henry Copeland, BlogAds
Peter Kim, ForresterCharlene Li, Forrester
David Dunne, Edelman
Max Kalehoff, Nielsen Buzzmetrics (now with Clickable)Advertising Research Foundation
Sarah Petersen, StrategyOne
Richard Edelman, Edelman
Jonny Bentwood, Edelman
Rick Murray, me2revolution
Dr. Walter Carl, Northeastern University, ChatThreads

Looks like a pretty lively discussion on a pretty nebulous concept - how to measure influence, and influencers online.

Nice anlaysis of "The arc of the influence" which quite rightly focuses on engaging people as a way of effectively communicating with them, but for me the best best thing about a paper like this is that it does prompt a whole load of other thoughts, which for me are about the role that PR agencies will play, compared to other marketing comms agencies - and how evaluation (and our experience of it) will be increasingly important in determining where marketing budgets are spent.

Other agencies have traditionally used tracking surveys (for reputation) and some direct response mechanisms as part of ROI calculations. PR has tended to use coverage volumes and some sentiment analysis, but these reports don't come close to competing with the big budgets involved compared to - say - the instantaneous "success" or "failure" of sales generated by clever advertising or media buying. But clearly the opportunities ahead, as reputations are increasingly made and then influenced online, make it in our own best interests to demonstrate the commercial (as well as reputational) value of involving us alongside (or instead of?) other marcomms agencies...

As an industry we (PRs) therefore need to work together at making exactly this sort of analysis work transparently and in our favour - and this white paper is a great contribution to the discussion.