Inside PR 3.50: Fake Reviewers and the Global Laws

October 16, 2013 • Gini Dietrich • PR

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Recently the New York attorney general’s office conducted a year-long sting to find people who are posting fake reviews online in exchange for money.

What they found is there were 19 companies paying anywhere from $1 to $10 per positive review posted. They fined the organizations a combined $350,000 for the unethical work.

Michael Lasky, an attorney who specializes in PR firms, wrote about the undercover operation and provided four lessons for PR professionals, in a recent PR Week column.

The warning is clear: While the sting only looked at SEO firms, PR could be next.

So what does it mean for PR firms?

We already know Wikipedia is adamant against PR professionals posting anything in there on behalf of their clients, unless it’s clearly disclosed. And, ProPublica just came out against the New York Times for not disclosing who helped them with the President Putin editorial (hint: It was Ketchum).

So where is the line?

We know what is black (fake reviews, astroturfing, whisper campaigns) and we know what is white (honesty, transparency, disclosure). But what about the grey?

Say you work for a multi-national company that has offices around the globe. You write a blog post and ask your colleagues to share it on their social networks.

Is that ethical?

Or you have clients who produce content and you ask your team to comment on it and share it.

Is that ethical?

Is it realistic to expect the New York Times or the BBC to disclose the PR firms they worked with on the stories that had some outside influence?

This week’s episode covers these issues and how to tow the grey line.

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We’d love to hear your thoughts.

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

Inside PR is produced by Kristine D’Arbelles and Ashlea LeCompte.

Inside PR 3.49: Jay Baer wants companies to be more useful

October 11, 2013 • Martin • PR

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We’ve talked to author, digital strategist and speaker extraordinaire Jay Baer on Inside PR a few times before. In fact, the first time was after the 2009 PRSA Counselors Academy Conference in Palm Springs that Jay references in the beginning of his new book, Youtility: Why Smart Marketing is About Help, Not Hype (highly recommended by Martin).

Jay is the closing keynote at Meshmarketing conference in Toronto on November 7, so we thought this is a good time to catch up with him and discuss what’s new.

Jay defines youtility, the theme of his book, as creating marketing that has so much intrinsic value people would pay for it. He says many companies are embracing this principle because it helps them break through the clutter we face today.

He encourages businesses to ‘market their marketing’ by developing a launch strategy for their content that leads people to it.

The competitive landscape has altered the information we consume into a mashup of personal and professional sources and Jay he believes businesses need to develop relationships with customers that are similar to the relationship people have with their friends. He calls that friend of mine awareness.

Jay says the PR industry, which became active in social media early on because it understood the importance of stories and relationships, now has to change the way it executes and move from being talkers to skilled makers of content like infographics, videos and white papers. Most PR agencies don’t have makers on staff and have to outsource too much of that work.

Joe experienced the concept of Youtility last week and references a number of blog posts from trusted sources on what we need to know about the new Google algorithm; he received useful information in real-time that helped him.

Gini is surprised businesses are still not creating launch plans for marketing the content they produce in order to help amplify it.

Joe talks about how he’s moved Thornley Fallis into an agency of makers with video, web design and creative people in-house. However, he’s noticed some clients aren’t including PR agencies when they’re looking to develop an integrated campaign and we need to change that.

Gini, who also transformed her firm into a maker agency, agrees and says there’s some confusion on the client side on what we, as new PR agencies, can do.

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We’d love to hear your thoughts.

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

Inside PR is produced by Kristine D’Arbelles and Ashlea LeCompte.

Inside PR 3.48: Transparency and Disclosure in Media Relations

October 9, 2013 • thornley • PR

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On this week’s Inside PR podcast, Martin Waxman, Gini Dietrich and Joseph Thornley tackle an issue raised by Gini in a post on Spin Sucks: disclosure by PR agencies of business interest in media relations pitches. Gini kicks off the conversation by asking the question, “Should media disclose every time they work with a PR person in preparing a story?” Martin tells a story of a lesson earned through experience and Joe argues that the real issue isn’t the activity of PR agencies, but the notion that PR agencies are attempting to influence objective news gatekeepers. And we go from there.

Also this week, Martin also recommends that PR practitioners should take a close look at Google’s recent Hummingbird search algorithm changes.

Finally, in this episode, we talk about taking Inside PR on the road. We’ll be covering MeshMarketing which takes place in Toronto on November 7. If you are a marketer near or in Toronto, this is a conference well worth attending. You can find details on the schedule and registration here.

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We would love your thoughts.

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

Inside PR is produced by Kristine Simpson and Ashlea LeCompte.

Inside PR 3.47: Viral Videos and What Makes the News

September 25, 2013 • Gini Dietrich • PR

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What constitutes news?

Martin Waxman and I talk about what constitutes news and how easy it is to trick not just the Interwebz, but the news media as well.

Case in point: A young woman was practicing her twerking in her apartment when her roommate opened the door into her and she fell onto a coffee table full of lit candles. Her yoga pants caught on fire and the video ends with her screaming and jumping around, trying to put out the flames.

Jimmy Kimmel invited her on the show and it came out the video was a fake, the girl is a stunt actor, and yet…all the news media covered it as if it were a real thing.

As well, The Onion had a piece by Meredith Artley, the managing editor of CNN.com, about why Miley Cyrus’ VMA performance was their top story of the day.

It’s an interesting conundrum. We are attracted to the train wrecks, which create the eyeballs and the clicks, but we complain when the media doesn’t cover the more serious news of the day, such as what’s happening in Syria or Kenya.

So what makes the news? If you are in charge of a brand’s journalism, do you cover what’s important or what drives eyeballs? Do we have a right to complain about the viral videos and twerking if we are more interested in the gossip and train wrecks instead of the hard news?

We would love your thoughts.

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

Inside PR is produced by Kristine Simpson and Ashlea LeCompte.

Inside PR 3.46: Google introduces In-depth articles

September 20, 2013 • Martin • PR

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Earlier in the month, Gini wrote a blog post about Google’s In-depth articles. She discovered them when she was doing a search for a client and, in addition to the regular results, noticed a series of three other links listed at the bottom of the page.

She dug a bit deeper and found Google launched In-depth articles in August to feature longer-form content people are talking about – usually from mainstream media outlets. (Note: a search of ‘google in-depth articles’ did not include any in-depth articles, but did show Gini’s post.)

Recently Google has been using three elements to determine ranking: recency and relevancy, popularity and authority. Now, in combination with these measures, content creators should consider developing longer-form pieces like ebooks or white papers.

These are more reflective pieces that should demonstrate the writer has done their research, cited credible sources and has the authority to offer a perspective on the topic that adds value.

Agencies and organizations will want to experiment with longer-form articles to determine what works and how it affects the perception and discoverability of their brand.

Joe says it’s interesting to watch where search is heading and recalls that four or five years ago you would get really interesting links when you searched a topic. Now, in top-level searches he’s seeing is the equivalent of ‘network television’ – that is, links from larger outlets rather than the independent voices that often provided a fresh point of view.

Martin wonders whether this is Google’s way to re-legitimize media outlets as publishers and point people back to them.

For our Canadian listeners, In Depth Articles don’t work in Google.ca, so you’ll need to search in Google.com. Right now, it only seems to be for top-level searches.

Are these shifts toward more mainstream results harkening back to the brochure-ware websites we used to find online? What happened to the individual voices we know are out there? Will the average person understand how to refine their searches in order to find independent voices? What’s the impact on communicators who want to reach a wider audience?

We’d love to hear your ideas on where you think search is heading.

And as we mentioned, here’s the link to the new subscription-based ‘Netflix for books’ app, Oyster.

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Send us an email or an audio comment to [email protected], 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. Our theme music was created by Damon de Szegheo; Roger Dey is our announcer. Inside PR is produced by Kristine Simpson and Ashlea LeCompte.

Inside PR 3.45: Good PR firms evolve

September 14, 2013 • thornley • PR

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On this week’s episode of Inside PR, Martin Waxman, Gini Dietrich and Joseph Thornley chat about the recent changes in Google’s handling of news releases and the impact that has on PR agencies.

Gini argues that these changes will motivate good PR agencies to become even better. It forces us to go back to basics, to focus on relationships, not on search ranking hacks. Martin suggests that we need to reconsider the concept of “owned media relationships,” that we must look at them as shared relationships with our clients. Joe believes that media relationships always are “functional.” They exist only as long as we can be of value to the journalists at the other end. And we must constantly be focused on what the person at the other end of the line cares about and having something interesting to say about this.

For the past several years, PR pros have been led to play the SEO game to match Google’s rules and guidelines. We succeeded at doing this in the past and we’ll succeed in adopting to the new algorithms. Change isn’t bad for any industry. Change is just bad for those who refuse to learn and change themselves. As Martin says, It’s always time for the PR industry to come up with a better way of doing things.

We also talk about the recent SXSW V2V conference in Las Vegas. Martin attended this inaugural edition of a new conference by the folks who organize Austin’s SXSW conference. And he found it to be a return to the smaller, more intimate gathering of a community drawn together by common interests. Great energy. Much more intimate. Much more like SXSW in its early years. Worth attending this year. Worth considering attending next year.

We close out this week’s episode with a comment from Mark Buell relating to our earlier discussion about protecting your identity online. Mark recommends that you should “regularly check which third party applications have access to your Twitter account. If the service doesn’t require ongoing access (like Hootsuite, Klout, etc.) revoke its access. Third party access is a weak link in your social media security chain.” Thanks go to Mark for a practical useful tip.

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Inside PR 3.44: Getting Creative at South by Southwest V2V

August 29, 2013 • Martin • Inside PR

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This week, we’ve got a special episode of Inside PR live from the South by Southwest V2V conference in Las Vegas. OK, live to digital audio.

Just before we recorded, I’d attended a high energy and insightful panel on creativity and brainstorming and invited the panelists to continue the discussion on the show.

Note: We’re in one of the speaker lounges so apologies for the sound quality and background noise. Next time, I’ll travel with my portable IPR studio, that is, I’ll find a quieter spot.

Our guests are:
Helen Todd, co-founder and CEO, Sociality Squared
Adam Marelli, artist and photographer based in NYC
Jim Hopkinson, fellow podcaster at the Hopkinson Report, author and principal of Hopkinson Creative Media
Jey Van-Sharp, business strategist and market analyst/editor at My Uber Life

Here are some highlights of our conversation:

Adam Marelli says one of the best pieces of advice he ever received on creativity came from a Zen monk who said do just one thing at a time. For Adam, no matter how long the to-do list becomes, he finds he’s most creative if he focuses on a specific task without distractions.

For Jey Van-Sharp, it’s all about prioritizing your priorities. He starts by thinking of the objective as a big boulder you can’t move very easily. Then he breaks it into smaller rocks and easy to handle pebbles, with each pebble being one task. Each day he picks several tasks to work on, knowing he can’t get through them all at once, but will accomplish the project over time.

Jim Hopkinson believes you should really know yourself and references a Paul Graham post on maker’s and manger’s schedules and how the two are often in opposition. Being creative means being a maker and it’s important to find clumps of uninterrupted time for your work.

Helen Todd agrees you need to block off periods during your day to cultivate your ideas. Her advice: avoid productive procrastination – where you work on administrative projects or answering emails because it makes you feel productive, when you should be focusing on the creative challenge at hand.

Final word goes to Adam who says, there’s an art to failure and you get there by practicing it; the separation between failure and success is very thin.

Do you consider yourself creative or in a creative job? What challenges do you have coming up with fresh ideas? Is creativity something you live and breathe or do you try to compartmentalize it? Any tips you’d like to share? We’d love to hear from you.

You may also be interested in the interview we did with Festival producer Christine Auten.

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Inside PR 3.43: Online Security for PR Pros

August 21, 2013 • Gini Dietrich • PR

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To start, Martin Waxman is gaming his Klout score by using Spin Sucks as his platform. He began with a Klout score of 68, used a guest post to encourage social shares and climbed to 70 before settling on 69.

Learn more about the experiment and what we learned in just a few days about the influence game.

But that’s not the main point of our podcast today.

The point of our discussion comes from a question from Liza Butcher.

She asks:

My Twitter account has been “compromised” three times in the last two weeks. I would love if you could do a show or part of a show on the best way to protect yourself and/or your organization from being hacked or, as Twitter calls it, “compromised.” Do you think this is something that is happening more and more?

As it relates to online privacy, I relate a story that happened with Spin Sucks where we were under attack for more than two weeks. Because we use LastPass to generate our passwords every few days, we lucked out and the worst that happened was the blog was slow. But if it had been two months ago, they would have gotten us for sure.

We discuss what online passwords mean to each of you personally, how to secure yourself, how to use good judgement, and which tools to use.

A special thanks to Liza and to David Jones for their comments.

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Inside PR 3.42: Our take on the Publicis Omnicom merger

August 9, 2013 • thornley • PR

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In this week’s episode of the Inside PR podcast, Gini Dietrich, Martin Waxman and Joseph Thornley talk about the Omnicom Publicis merger. Will this yield opportunities for independent agencies? While the deal seems to have be driven by considerations of scale and efficiencies, what of the creatives who actually attract the clients? What about the clients themselves? Where was the client demand for this type of a deal? And what about the front line employees? Will they see immediate benefits from this deal or will they experience uncertainty as they wait for the other shoe to drop? Will they be distracted? Will smaller clients suffer from inattention as management focuses on securing the larger clients? And what about PR? Where does it fit in the thinking of the new mega-holding company?

Also in this episode, we discuss Hootsuite’s $165 million funding round and we receive a comment from David Jones, one of the original Inside PR podcasters.

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