Inside PR 437: Twitter turns ten plus tips for error-free writing

March 28, 2016 • thornley • PR

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Twitter turns ten. Four tips for good writing. And a legal decision that brings nothing good to anyone.

This week, on Inside PR 437, Gini Dietrich and Joseph Thornley fly without Martin Waxman. But we’ll all be back again next week. So, please come back.

This week’s first #IPRMustKnow: Twitter turns ten. It changed communications for Gini and Joe – and it’s still as relevant for us as it’s ever been. There’s been a lot of talk about Twitter being in trouble. And while it may not be meeting the venture capitalists’ expectations, it meets our expectations for a useful tool that we use every day. But as we look back, we know that Twitter was a learned tool. Just take a look at the very different first Tweets that Martin, Gini and Joe published.

Gini was true to her form, using Twitter to try another tool:

First Twitter post-for me a bit like jumping into a cold lake. I’ve been standing on the shore for a while just contemplating. Here goes.

— Martin Waxman (@martinwaxman) September 1, 2008

And Martin was loquacious. Why waste a good communications opportunity?

Testing ping.fm

— Gini Dietrich (@ginidietrich) December 6, 2008

Finally, Joe was dry and matter of fact in his first tweet.

trying out twitter

— Joseph Thornley (@thornley) March 10, 2007

For our second #IPRMustKnow, we point to an article by Sylvia Stead, the Globe and Mail’s Public Editor, warning against the four most common sources of mistakes by journalists. As Gini and Joe see it, these aren’t just the source of errors for journalists, but also for any research-based writer. Stead suggests,

“…it’s worth keeping these things in mind: 1. Stay focused. 2. Don’t hurry. 3. Never assume you know. 4. Check one last time – especially names, numbers and factual statements.”

Finally, Gini and Joe talk about the Jian Ghomeshi trial and verdict in Canada. Not an easy issue. One on which we all have views. And not something that Gini or Joe would go near.

We’d love to know what you think.

Is Twitter still a mainstay for you? Will it continue to be in the future?
What tips do you offer new writers to help them produce strong, accurate business writing.

Leave a comment on the blog, send us an email or an audio comment to [email protected], join the FIR Google+ Community, join the Inside PR Facebook group, 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 436: A crowded video space and agency fraud

March 20, 2016 • thornley • Inside PR

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Gini Dietrich, Martin Waxman and Joseph Thornley are back together again for another Inside PR – the first in which all three of us are together in over a month.

IPR MustKnows

In this episode’s #IPRMust Know segment, we talk about Meerkat’s pivot, Facebook Reactions and Snapchat’s big video view numbers.

Meerkat is moving away from live streaming and attempting to pivot to become some type of video social network. Not surprising, given the tight integration of Periscope and Twitter and the introduction of Facebook live videos. It would be tough to see how Meerkat could stand out with the two main realtime social networks offering their own live streaming platforms.

Facebook Reactions have been with us for several weeks now. Chris Penn’s early look at the impact of Facebook Reactions suggested that “haven’t statistically changed engagement yet. If you publish unengaging content, Reactions won’t help you. If you already have a highly-engaged audience, you will likely continue to do so – Reactions don’t appear to make it better or worse.” We offer our own early reactions to Reactions.

If you didn’t have enough video in your life, take a look at Snapchat. Snapchat’s CEO Evan Spiegel says that Snapchat users are watching more than 8 billion videos per day. There’s clearly an audience for video. So, if you produce video as part of your initiatives, it’s worth checking out what works well on Snapchat.

Fake accounts. Could this happen to you?

We close out this episode with a discussion of the communications agency executive who faked over $250 million in contracts go gain advancement at this advertising agency. Sad but true.

And a big thanks to Suzy Chisholm. Suzy, who heard Joe state a few episodes back that he preferred single purpose apps over those that take a “Swiss Army Knife” approach. Suzy, who lives in Switzerland, sent us three Swiss Army Knives, branded with the Philips logo (where Suzy works) and a very nice note. Thank you Suzy. You brought smiles to our faces and reminded us that there are times when you want to reach for that one thing that does it all. 🙂

We’d love to know what you think.

Are you live streaming video for business? Are you using Periscope? Facebook Live Video? Meerkat or something else?
Are you training your team to use video or do you call in video specialists to produce video?
Are you seeing any impact from Facebook Reactions?
Is Snapchat for you?
Fake accounts. Could this happen to you? How do you make sure that you get paid for the work you do?
How many Swiss Army Knives do you own?

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 435: Advertising Equivalencies. Pshaw!

March 14, 2016 • thornley • PR

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This week, Gini Dietrich and Martin Waxman fly without Joseph Thornley – who has gone missing. (Drat that day job.)

Martin leads off with a discussion of Jack Dorsey‘s attempt to shift perceptions in the ongoing conversation about the future of Twitter. Gini talks about the importance of managing crises by participating in conversations where they are already taking place. As Gini points out, many people resist change to the applications they know and are accustomed to using. That resistance will only be overcome with clear explanations and allowing people time to consider and try the new and changed features. Here’s a post from Verge discussing what it will look like.

Speaking of shifting perceptions, Martin and Gini have a great discussion about ads featuring celebrities. And then they use this as a launching point to talk about advertising equivalencies (AVEs) and the importance of the PR industry to measure meaningful outcomes.

We’d love to know 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 Joseph Thornley.

Inside PR 434: Counselors Academy and Specialization vs. Generalization in PR

March 7, 2016 • thornley • Inside PR, PR

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Gini Dietrich, Martin Waxman and Joseph Thornley take a look at PRSA’s Counselors Academy this week. The Counselors Academy conference is coming up May 1-3 in San Juan, Puerto Rico. All three of us have participated in the past. It is a unique opportunity for PR agency leaders to learn about the “business of the business.” It’s a networking place to find others who share the same business challenges that you do as a communications business leader. In fact, Martin, Gini and Joe first met at the Counsellors Academy annual conference in Phoenix. It’s not too late to register for this year’s conference. If you do attend, make sure to say hello to Martin! 🙂

For our second topic, Gini asks the question, “Is specialization in PR a thing of the past or the way of the future?” Martin and Joe weigh in with their views and how they have harnessed generalist and specialist knowledge in their careers.

We’d love to know 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.

IPR 433: Tools to manage comments

March 2, 2016 • thornley • Inside PR

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On this week’s Inside PR, Gini Dietrich and Joseph Thornley talk about keeping comments from dying. Gini talks about her experience with the SpinSucks blog. Gini has watched comments on her blog decrease while conversation on private Facebook groups has increased. One of the things she is doing to bring renewed life to the comment area of SpinSucks is to switch from LiveFyre to Postmatic for comment management. Postmatic enables commenting via email. Danny Brown is a big advocate of Postmatic, which enables commenting via email. Danny says that he has experienced a substantial lift in comments on his blog since enabling email comments through Postmatic. So, Gini has decided to try it. She’s testing it out now and will chronicle her experience with it on future episodes of Inside PR.

We also talk about the absolute must-use, can’t live without it tool for all content publishers – Google Analytics. Gini and I use Analytics daily for all of our sites. We talk about why – the insights into the performance of our content. We spend so much time creating it. Why walk away and simply hope that it reached an audience. We share how we use it – and hopefully this will help you as well.

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 432: More must-have PR apps

January 24, 2016 • Martin • Inside PR, PR

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Martin here and this week, it’s part two of our discussion about apps and tools we like.

But first #IPRMustKnow:

The Twitter 10K – No it’s not a marathon, it’s the chatter that Twitter’s going to increase its character limit to 10,000 (from 140). We’re mixed on what we think about this. Gini feels it’s another replacement for the verbosity of emails. Joe noticed that even with more characters in DMs, he’s getting fewer of those. I wonder if this isn’t another way to keep people on the platform in mobile. OK, we all like Twitter the way it is… but we also don’t want to be curmudgeons.

Peach – the social network flavour of the moment. Peach is a new social network and messaging app created by Vine’s co-founder. Have you tried it? When we recorded this episode, Gini, Joe and I each had two friends on it and (hint) they’re all hosts of IPR. It’s too early to tell whether or not Peach will catch on – certainly the network effect isn’t evident yet. But, like all new social platform, we encourage you to check it out and see for yourself. And feel free to connect with us there.

And that brings us to our main topic – apps we like and use.

Slack
If you haven’t tried it, Slack is a collaborative chat and networking app that helps manage projects and workflow. Among other things, we use it to prep for IPR. You can set up channels for conversations specific to your needs (i.e. client channels, trends, etc.), add and save links, post documents and easily find what you’re looking for through its search. We all like its simplicity and that it gives us the ability to communicate in the moment.

Auphonic
Auphonic is an audio production app that we use to produce IPR. It lets us edit, include metadata, equalize sound and reduce hum. And because of Auphonic, Inside PR now has its album art back on iTunes.

What other apps would you recommend? We’d love to hear your suggestions and test them out.

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 431: The must-have apps for communicators in 2016

January 11, 2016 • thornley • Inside PR

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What are the tools that you as a communications professional use every day in your work? The tools that you just couldn’t live without?

This week on Inside PR, Martin Waxman, Gini Dietrich and I talk about the top apps and digital tools that we use and that we recommend should be in every communicator’s toolbox.

First up: Evernote. An amazing app for taking notes, for organizing your ideas, for developing to do lists. It’s an app that syncs across all your devices – desktop, your table, and your phone. Evernote has a range of plug ins and extensions that make it even more useful. Gini has a Moleskin notebook that she uses to handwrite notes, which she then scans into Evernote to make them searchable. I use Evernote’s Scannable iOS App in place of a traditional scanner. Just point it at a document and Scannable will capture the document and import it to Evernote and enable you to share it via the channel of your choice. If you are still taking notes in Word and saving the notes as separate documents, consider trying Evernote. Your thoughts, ideas and images will always be a search away.

Next, Gini tells us about Zoom.us. We recorded this podcast on Zoom.us. It provides great HD audio plus HD video. (Yes, the quality of our audio is not all that we’d like it to be. That’s not Zoom’s fault. That’s because we are using WiFi to connect to the Internet. Clearly, we need to use wired connections if we want the highest quality audio and video.) Zoom.su enables users to set up meetings and invite participants, who can join simply by clicking on a link. Participants can connect to audio via the Web or the phone. We’ve found this tool to be a far superior user experience when compared to something like WebEx or even Skype.

Finally, this episode, we talk about Feedly. Feedly is our RSS reader of choice. Feedly delivers the content from the sources that matter to us as soon as it is published. And unlike earlier RSS readers, it makes the act of subscribing as simple as copying a URL into the subscribe window. This is important to people who need to follow a specialized subject or a set of experts and who cannot rely on their social networks to tell them about something. Martin looks at Feedly as a “personal subscribe button” that delivers content to one inbox.

We want to know what you think about the things we discussed on this episode.

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 430: The age of distributed news

January 3, 2016 • thornley • Inside PR

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Martin Waxman, Gini Dietrich and I are all back together for Inside PR 430, the episode that marks the turn of the year. Out with 2015. Here comes 2016.

This week, we discuss the things that stood out for us as we left 2015 behind.

Remember Google Zeitgeist? Well, it’s a thing of the past, replaced by a new 2015-year-in-review site that takes advantage of the updated Google Trends site. Google Trends was relaunched in mid-year to provide data on searches up to the current minute. (Late in 2015, Google added a pop-out feature that enables you to keep a display of the trends and the latest stories on each that automatically update and scroll in your browser.) Google has used the new trends to curate the most significant searches of the year. And for those outside of the United States, Google has created a series of pages for different countries. And yes, we still have differences in interests. We share some things in common – the Paris bombings and the Pope, for example. But we also search for the more local events and people that are most important to us where we live. Google’s year-end was a smart way to highlight the new Google Trends. If you haven’t visited Trends lately, give is a try. It’s smart, timely and useful.

We’re moving to a mobile-first world. And that means that we are spending more time in mobile apps instead of on the Web. That’s a big problem for Google, which founded its business on Web searches. But Google, like time, never stands still. And in November, Google announced that it is integrating mobile app content into searches on the Google app. Users of the Google App will be able to see content that exists only in mobile apps. Even better, Google will enable them to “open” the app as a streaming app, even if they don’t have the app itself installed on their phones. Google says that this is still an experiment, and the company rolled it out to Android users in the US-only. Yes, US-only. The rollout to the rest of the world can’t come soon enough. And to the Google naysayers, here’s evidence that Google is not going to slip into irrelevance along with desktop computing.

And Google has to innovate to keep up with the new pacesetter, Facebook. One of Facebook’s biggest moves in the past year has been the launch of Facebook Instant Articles. The basic concept is that publishers will post their stories natively to Facebook. By doing this, Facebook is providing a near instant loading of these stories on Facebook’s mobile apps. The company marshalled behavioural data it had collected in order to convince publishers that they should accept that the future of publishing is distributed across whatever platform people want to use. And by far and away the biggest platform of all is Facebook. Facebook introduced Instant Articles on a limited basis in May and then rolled them out to all users in October. Judging by my Facebook news feed, Instant Articles have become a permanent fixture of the news distribution system.

Attention is fragmented. And we want content immediately on the mobile device we are holding. In 2015, Google captured the implications of this in the concept of micro-moments – those instants of undivided attention which may lead to decisions and action. Google backed up this concept with research and published a special Website for marketers dedicated to Micro-moments. If you missed the site when it was first published, it’s well worth a read now.

And with all these changes, what about SEO. Clearly, the SEO playbook has changed substantially in recent years. We talk about whether PR pros are keeping up with the changing environment, technologies and best practices.

Are we talking only to ourselves? We hope not. Please let us know what you think about the things we discussed on this episode.

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 429: AMP up your Website’s mobile performance

December 31, 2015 • thornley • Inside PR

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On this week’s Inside PR podcast, Gini Dietrich and I take a look at some big changes about to occur on the mobile Web and the changed world of professional communicators.

AMPhtml will speed up the mobile web

If you haven’t been paying attention to AMPhtml, you should be. AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages and it is Google’s effort to speed up the mobile Web. It has involved publishers, tech companies, analytics providers and advertisers in the effort. We should start to see Google AMP pages start to show up in search results in late February. Early test reports suggest that users will see substantial improvements in the speed of pages served on mobile devices. Pinterest, for example, “found that AMP pages load four times faster and use eight times less data than traditional mobile-optimized pages.”

Write interesting content on topics that people are about

How do you create content that people really want? Well, a proven technique is to write about the things that people are searching for. Gini tells us about some useful keyword tools she is using: AnswerthePublic, FAQFox, and KWFinder. We know that we have to write unique content that will be valuable to people. But it still helps to write about things that people care about.

Finally, we talk about how different what we do as communicators as we enter 2016 is from what we did a few years ago. We’re more digital, analytics-driven, performance producing. But we wonder if the broader industry can make this move.

Martin Waxman was traveling this week. However, he will rejoin us for next week’s podcast.

Are we talking only to ourselves? We hope not. Please let us know what you think about the things we discussed on this episode.

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 428: Teaching an old podcast new tricks

December 29, 2015 • thornley • Inside PR

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Gini Dietrich, Martin Waxman and I are back with another episode of the Inside PR podcast. And we’re doing something different. We’re using a new application, Zoom.us, to record the show.

Podcasting is new and old at the same time. It’s relatively new when compared to traditional radio. But still it’s been around for a decade now. And the Inside PR podcast is in its tenth year of production. For all of its life, we have recorded it as a double ender, with the hosts each recording their tracks locally on their computer or a dedicated recorder. Following recording, we upload our individual tracks to a shared dropbox. Then the show’s producer edit combines the voice tracks together with the musical intros and outros, edits out the bloopers (yes, there are even more than the ones that you hear) and runs the finished product through a program called Auphonic to eliminate background rumble and level the sound across the different input sources.

Zoom.us replaces the double ender recording of individual tracks onto separate devices with a single online recording which can be downloaded as a single, level-balanced track. This eliminates a lot of work. But even more importantly, it also enables us to capture the recording on video. And we’re keen to add a video component to what until now has been an audio-only podcast.

So, for now it’s an experiment. If you listen closely to this week’s episode, you’ll hear some significant variations in the sound quality between Gini, Martin and I. We’re attempting to identify the source of the differences – mic quality, the age and specs of the computer, the quality of the internet connection are the obvious first candidates for scrutiny. But as we bring up the general quality level, we hope to move on to offer a video feed in addition to the traditional audio feed. So, stay tuned for that.

But enough about the technology. How about the discussion? This we we talk about being more productive by doing deep work, not shallow work. Whether you are a consultant or a corporate exec, I think you’ll find something in this discussion that you can put to use to improve your productivity.

Are we talking only to ourselves? We hope not. Please let us know what you think about the things we discussed on this episode.

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.