Inside PR 417: Ezra Klein’s vision of the future of media

August 3, 2015 • thornley • PR

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On this week’s Inside PR podcast, Martin Waxman, Gini Dietrich and I talk about three #IPRMustKnows. All three involve either Google or Facebook and two relate to video. Listen to the podcast for news about Facebook tools for video publishers, a new YouTube mobile player and the next steps in gutting Google+.

Our main discussion item was suggested to us by Robert Carver (Thanks Robert!). Recently, Ezra Klein peered into the future and came up with the question, Is the Media Becoming a Wire Service? Klein’s article is thought provoking and a worthwhile read. He posits a tradeoff between greater reach and an erosion in innovation. Gini, Martin and I are drawn into Klein’s vision of the future with both enthusiasm and trepidation. Give it a listen and then tell us what you think? Is Klein’s vision of future journalism something that you think will come to pass?

We’d love to hear from you.

Send us an email or an audio comment to [email protected], join the FIR Google+ Community, join the Inside PR Google+ Community, join the Inside PR Facebook group, leave us a comment here, message us @inside_pr on Twitter, or connect with Gini Dietrich, Joseph Thornley, and Martin Waxman on Twitter.

And we have a favor to ask: if you like this podcast, please rate us on iTunes.

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Thank you to the people behind Inside PR.

Our theme music was created by Damon de Szegheo; Roger Dey is our announcer.

Inside PR is produced by Joseph Thornley.

Inside PR 416: All the news you can get on Facebook and Twitter

July 17, 2015 • Martin • PR

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Martin here and I hope you don’t mind if I start with a plug. I’m heading to SXSWV2V in Las Vegas to be a mentor and on a panel called, The Best City in the World May Not Be a City at All. We’ll be talking about what it takes to make the kind of community people flock to live and work in and whether that’s a physical location, online or a creative combination of the two.

Now onto the show with our #IPRMustKnow for this week:

Meerkat introduces Cameo – a new feature that lets you hand off your livestream to other users and offer another angle on a real-time video story.

Twitter keeps getting better at paid promotion and rolls out campaign insights and audience personas to all users.

Facebook changes its settings and allows people to choose which friends and brands they want to see more of in their newsfeed. Have you adjusted yours?

In our main topic, we discuss a recent Pew Study that focuses on how and where we discover and consume news. Turns out 63% of people on both Facebook and Twitter get news from those platforms. Which helps explain why social networks continue to evolve into media companies.

One stat that stood out: just over 60 per cent of millennials get political news from Facebook and 37 per cent from local TV. The numbers are reversed for boomers. What does that mean? Well, don’t think that millennials will switch to TV when they become ‘mature adults’ – because, hey, that’s what adults are supposed to do. It’s yet another wake up call to mainstream media – and PR – on the need to evolve and transform.

And while we’re on the subject of media, do you get a newspaper delivered to your door? If so, how often do you read it? Where do you go first for information and news – social platforms or MSM?

We’d love to hear from you.

And we have a favor to ask: if you like this podcast, please rate us on iTunes.

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Thank you to the people behind Inside PR.

Our theme music was created by Damon de Szegheo; Roger Dey is our announcer.

Inside PR is produced by Joseph Thornley.

Inside PR 415: You Talkin’ to Me?

July 8, 2015 • Gini Dietrich • PR

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In this week’s edition of #IPRMustKnow, which you, our dear listeners, seem to like, we discuss:

Yelp traffic could decline for the first time ever after Google changed its search algorithm.
Web design is dead…and what that means for your use of social networks and mobile platforms.
Instagram not only plans to compete with Twitter, but to beat them by sharing timely photos from world events.

And in the main topic of this week’s show:

About a week ago, a PR firm executive wrote a column titled, “PR Agency Leads Should Only Follow On Twitter.”

(We are not going to prove a link because we don’t want to give the story any SEO juice, but it’s pretty easy to find if you want to read it.)

You see the author, a lead at a very well-known firm, thinks those of us who run agencies should only follow people on Twitter—not engage, respond, or even tweet.

This is what she says:

Don’t get me wrong: I believe wholeheartedly in clients and influencers using Twitter to get the word out. But what I can’t for the life of me wrap my head around is why anyone in an agency — especially those working in PR, whose core responsibility is to help clients protect and amplify their brand voice — believes they should be out front adding their two cents proactively or using it as a publicity engine for their own means.

We discuss why this is completely short-sighted and bad advice for the leaders of any organization, not just those of PR firms.

And we have a favor to ask: if you like this podcast, please rate us on iTunes.

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Thank you to the people behind Inside PR.

Our theme music was created by Damon de Szegheo; Roger Dey is our announcer.

Inside PR is produced by Joseph Thornley.

Inside PR 414: End of Days for Human Content Creators?

July 7, 2015 • thornley • PR

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This week on Inside PR, Martin Waxman, Gini Dietrich and I give you three #IPRMustKnows plus we talk about

First, the #IPRMustKnows:

Meerkat introduces and embeddable player. Now you can put your streaming media on your own site.
Yeplive joins the streaming video field. And it lets you shoot your video in landscape mode, unlike Meerkat and Persicope which serve up your videos in portrait mode. You can get the Yep Live app in the iOS and Play stores.
Google “began remotely installing audio-snooping code that was capable of listening to users.” The code supports Google’s hotword feature that enables voice commands. This is the kind of feature you need to be aware of. Remember what you enable on your device because always-on monitoring has become a “feature” of our lives.

In our main discussion this week, we turn our attention to the increasing role of algorithms and computer code not only to shape the distribution of news, but also to create content. Do you know when your news is generated by a person or generated by an algorithm? This is the type of development that strongly divides people. And it is a discussion that we’ll surely be having much more in the future.

We’d love to hear what you think.

And we have a favor to ask: if you like this podcast, please rate us on iTunes.

******************************************************************

Thank you to the people behind Inside PR.

Our theme music was created by Damon de Szegheo; Roger Dey is our announcer.

Inside PR is produced by Joseph Thornley.

Inside PR 413: A Swift Response to Intellectual Property

June 26, 2015 • Martin • PR

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This week we put on our pop music hats and talk about intellectual property and Taylor Swift.

But first #IPRMustKnow:

Google launches YouTube Newswire to verify breaking video news in real-time. Is the newswire about to be crowdsourced?

Speaking of news…Twitter announces Project Lightning, a curated source for news and major events, assembled by the Twitter media team (i.e. people not algorithms).

And…NYTimes temporarily blocks its homepage access from employees in an effort to help journalists better understand their readers who are accessing their news via smartphones and tablets and not from the virtual front page.

Taylor versus Goliath?

Taylor Swift stood up for independent artists and their right to be paid. And Apple Music, which was offering a three-month free trial to users subsidized by not paying royalties to artists, backed down. Swift argued that she personally doesn’t need the money, but independent artists shouldn’t have to lose the equivalent of one-quarter of their income to a profitable corporation like Apple.

Apple is an organization that has gone a long way to define its brand and design aesthetic and cultivated a loyal following. The company quickly realized that when people are deciding which music service to subscribe to, they’d rather be on the side that plays fair, not the one that’s seen to be taking advantage of artists.

Apple made its about-face after listening and being open to Taylor Swift’s POV. Swift is showing herself as a powerful social media force. And she’s smart about the way she does her own PR by creating opportunities for fans and building loyalty and engagement.

The bottom line: You may have to give away some content for free but profitable organizations should value intellectual property and not think of it as license to make money on the backs of creators.

And check out Gini’s rant on the high cost of the free economy!

We’d love to hear what you think.

And we have a favor to ask: if you like this podcast, please rate us on iTunes.

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Thank you to the people behind Inside PR.

Our theme music was created by Damon de Szegheo; Roger Dey is our announcer.

Inside PR is produced by Ashlea McGrath.

Inside PR 412: The Industry that Must Change

June 17, 2015 • Gini Dietrich • PR

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Though we recorded this the afternoon of game six, the Blackhawks won the Stanley Cup that evening!

Go Blackhawks!

The parade was yesterday and more than two million people descended on Soldier Field (which only seats 61,500) to celebrate with the team.

There is something to say about Chicago and its sports teams: We love them here.

This week, we’ve added a new feature on the show called IPR Must Knows. It will be an ongoing feature and we’d love for you to participate. Use the hashtag #iprmustknow if there is a story you’d like us to cover. We’ll add it to our list!

And this week…

IPR Must Knows

Twitter announces you can send DMs longer than 140 characters starting on July 1.
Facebook has changed its algorithm to put more placement on the things where you spend the most time. Creepy or cool? Joe wrote a nice piece about it.
A new Flipboard-like app is coming to Apple this summer with the new iOS9.

The Industry Must Change

The meat of our show is about the industry that needs to change. And it’s not just PR, it’s advertising, too.

On Medium, Gareth Kay talks about the advertising agency model that is dying and about it’s evolution.

On his own blog, Stephen Waddington talks about the PR industry and the lack of evolution.

Both of these, of course, are not new conversations, but we acknowledge there has been a remarkable period of change and it’s time for everyone to grow, innovate, and produce.

This could mean we recommend things where we don’t have expertise. For instance, communicators may recommend paid media. Advertisers may recommend inbound marketing. And marketers may recommend earned media.

The evolution is not only about incorporating new tactics and new technologies, but also about doing what’s best for the organization…not what’s in your own best interest.

We’d love to hear what you think.

And we have a favor to ask: if you like this podcast, please rate us on iTunes.

******************************************************************

Thank you to the people behind Inside PR.

Our theme music was created by Damon de Szegheo; Roger Dey is our announcer.

Inside PR is produced by Ashlea McGrath.

Inside PR 411: Communications across borders

June 12, 2015 • thornley • Inside PR, PR

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What happens when we are trying to communicate with people who live in another place with a distinctively different culture? Do they do things differently there? How can we be sensitive to these differences?

As communicators, we are attuned to the audience we want to reach. But still we are grounded in the people around us, to where we work and live. It’s hard not to have our approach shaped by “the way we do things around here.” In other words, the local culture. It’s what we’re exposed to each and every day. So we don’t challenge or think about whether it is the best way of doing things.

On this week’s episode of the Inside PR podcast, we explore these questions with two guests who have lived and worked on both sides of the Atlantic.

Suzy Chisholm is head of communications at Philips Switzerland. A transplanted Canadian, she has spent over twenty years living and working in Switzerland, a country at the heart of Europe and a country with three languages.

Sherrilynne Starkie has worked in Washington, London, the Isle of Man and now in Canada.

Both Suzy and Sherrilynne offer their perceptions and insights into the challenges of communicating in different cultures. And then Martin, Gini and I weigh in with our own thoughts.

We hope that this discussion opens some windows onto the different experiences and approaches people may have working as communicators around the world.

What is your experience? Have you had direct experience of the differences driven by culture and language? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

And we have a favor to ask: if you like this podcast, please rate us on iTunes.

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Thank you to the people behind Inside PR.

Our theme music was created by Damon de Szegheo; Roger Dey is our announcer.

Inside PR is produced by Ashlea McGrath.

Inside PR 410: Martin, You complete me

June 5, 2015 • thornley • PR, Shownotes

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You want to make your point. So, which do you try to do? Appeal to your listeners emotions? Or hit them with cold, hard reason?

Martin Waxman and I have a wide ranging and maybe too personal discussion of that question on this week’s Inside PR podcast. And in doing so, we may reveal a little too much about ourselves. But isn’t that why we podcast in the first place? So that we can not just communicate our ideas, but communicate them as real people?

What got us off on this line of discussion? An article by Lisa Lai published recently on HBR.org. In her article, Lai provides both a conceptual overview of the emotion reason dichotomy and some practical advice on how to decide which route to go in specific situations.

As I read this article, I realize that one of my failings through my career has been my propensity to appeal to reason. I approach the world as a rational place in which causes can be discerned and solutions devised. That’s a world in which all things can be engineered with determination, focus, and a well thought through plan of action.

Martin allows that he sees things through the human lens and his first instinct is to appeal to emotion. He has struggled with the need to introduce the rational in situations where emotion just won’t do it.

This leads us to think about the importance of being attuned to the other person in order to read which persuasion technique is best for them. And that takes us back to the most basic communication skill, listening. We must listen to the other person for the clues about what’s important to them in order to figure out which approach to take with them. My preference doesn’t matter. If I want to persuade another person I need to start with their preference as my anchor point.

That takes us even further afield to the most often used and most often abused communications technique of the digital era: email. You can’t read the other person using email. You can’t tell whether your argument is going to be effective, is going to tap the right place, either emotional or rational.

Finally, we talk about Crystal, a new app that promises to tell “you the best way to communicate with any coworker, prospect, or customer based on their unique personality.” Machine-generated empathy!

We’d love to hear your views. What do you think of the reason vs. emotion dichotomy? Are you ready to rely on a machine algorithm to help you communicate in the mode preferred by the other party?

And we have a favor to ask: if you like this podcast, please rate us on iTunes.

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Thank you to the people behind Inside PR.

Our theme music was created by Damon de Szegheo; Roger Dey is our announcer.

Inside PR is produced by Ashlea McGrath.

Inside PR 409: Living in a world of micro-moments and video to go

May 19, 2015 • Martin • Inside PR, PR

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Martin here and excuse me while I check my phone. I’m having a micro-moment. But more on that in a few, er-moments.

This week it’s Joe and me; Gini’s on the road. And because of our schedules recently, you’ve probably noticed May has been a quieter IPR month. But we’re all back in June.

In today’s episode, we have a couple of topics to discuss – both revolving around Google.

The first is micro-moments, or what Google describes as ‘I want to know, I want to go, I want to buy moments’. I call them the frequent times we turn to our smartphones during the day – often when we’re in the middle of something else – to find out some info, daydream, or take a mini-break from what we’re doing.

These mobile interactions are having a profound impact on the way we discover and consume information and what we do with our idle time.

Many of our micro-moments revolve around watching videos. And according to Google, people who view videos on their phones are 1.4 times as likely to watch ads as those on desktops or TVs and are more likely to talk about the ads they saw. Are the dollar signs lighting up?

The challenge for brands is to learn how to produce video that works for the small-screen. In other words, create for the medium – panorama shots may be amazing in a movie theatre, but don’t work so well on a five inch screen. Think about your audience and what they’re looking for and how you can reach them with the kind of video they want to see at the just the right point in time. Here’s a post from Joe with his thoughts on the importance of creating videos for mobile devices.

What do you think about micro-moments, how they’re affecting our purchase intent and attention spans? And when you’re in the middle of one of these moments, what kinds of video content makes you stop, watch and share?

We’d love to hear from you.

And thanks to Breyanna Tripp from Kent State and Charles Cawte for their comments.

And we have a favor to ask: if you like this podcast, please rate us on iTunes.

******************************************************************

Thank you to the people behind Inside PR.

Our theme music was created by Damon de Szegheo; Roger Dey is our announcer.

Inside PR is produced by Ashlea McGrath.

Inside PR 408: Now we all are Irish

May 4, 2015 • thornley • PR

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On this week’s Inside PR, Gini Dietrich, Martin Waxman and I talk about three things:

Twitter’s move of non-American account holders to Ireland;
LinkedIn as a content publishing platform; and
Buzzfeed’s bowing to advertisers’ demands to delete previously-published articles.

What do you think?

We’d love to hear from you.

And we have a favor to ask: if you like this podcast, please rate us on iTunes.

******************************************************************

Thank you to the people behind Inside PR.

Our theme music was created by Damon de Szegheo; Roger Dey is our announcer.

Inside PR is produced by Ashlea McGrath.