Philip Sheldrake has a book out called The Business of Influence, published by Wiley, in which he rethinks marketing and PR for the digital age.

I first crossed paths with Sheldrake in the late nineties and early noughties when we were both principals at rival PR firms and chased each other around tech parks in Cambridge and West London in pursuit of business. Since then we’ve worked together as part of the CIPR Social Media panel and created CIPR TV, working with markettiers4dc.

Sheldrake quotes Speed’s Steve Earl and myself in the book, as well as my daughters on their influences and networks. And so after a nudge and encouragement from Neville Hobson recently to have a crack at podcasting I was delighted to catch up with Sheldrake to record this interview.

We spoke about the emergence of the influence professional. If you are reading this blog you are almost certainly an influence professional and part of the influence industry. He calls on the PR industry to grow up by adopting management discipline and models.

“Not measuring PR smacks of professional incompetence. Anyone that says PR can’t be measured just hasn’t investigated it in a professional manner,” said Sheldrake.

But there are no easy answers. Sheldrake sounds a note of caution. “There is no universal answer for measurement. Every business must define its own metrics,” he said.

In researching and writing the Business of Influence, Sheldrake has himself been influenced by the Balanced Scorecard, a business performance management tool, and proposes his own model called the Influence Scorecard as a means of measuring of influence.

Sheldrake is a Chartered Engineer, a founding partner of Meanwhile, the venture marketers, a director of Intellect, the UK trade association for the tech industry, and director of 6UK, a government backed non–profit to promote adoption of the new Internet protocol in the UK.

If you enjoy the interview you might want to check out the book on Amazon or the accompanying web site and you’ll find Sheldrake on Twitter @sheldrake.

You can download a MP3 file of the interview by left clicking on this link with you mouse and selecting ‘save as’.