When a client stops returning your calls (Inside PR 524)

• • Inside PR, Show Notes

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On this week’s Inside PR podcast, we look at several developments and topics of interest to PR practitioners and agency leaders:

  • Google+ has gone away. We reflect on its demise and what it did and didn’t mean for us in its prime and at the end.
  • The retro-lovers among us may have noticed the return of the Palm brand name. It may go to show that there’s always a demand for people who turn left when the rest of us turn right.
  • There’s a new podcast for PR agency leaders, aptly named the Agency Leadership Podcast. And Gini Dietrich is co-hosting it with former Custom Scoop CEO Chip Griffin. Each week, Gini and Chip will provide insight into the challenges, skills and moves necessary to run an agency in the gig economy. This is Gini’s third podcast. She will continue to co-host Inside PR with Martin and Joe and she will also offer advice for practitioners on Spin Sucks. The era of Gini Dietrich podcasting truly has arrived. 
  • Is your boss an Algorithm? Algorithms are everywhere. They determine the content we see. They rate our performance at work. And their influence over us is expanding and growing. Is this something we should simply accept or should we become proactive in examining and shaping how and when they can be applied?
  • What do you do when clients refuse to call back? Last week, an agency owner raised the question in the Spin Sucks Community on Slack of how to handle a non-responsive client. We’ve all seen clients who get busy, who disappear for a while, or who are chronically late with feedback. And we have a good discussion of how we have dealt with that in the past.

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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.

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When a client stops returning your calls (Inside PR 524) by Joseph Thornley, Gini Dietrich, Martin Waxman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Inside PR 392: The algorithm called journalism

• • Inside PR

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We start this episode with a burning question from Gini: Is lasagna pasta – yes or no?

Joe and I both say yes. And so Gini, armed with the information she desperately needs, is ready to take on her dinner menu. That is, unless you, our listeners, think otherwise. Please let us know.

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming…

Joe starts the show talking about the notion of who makes news decisions – editors or algorithms. This was sparked by an Emily Bell speech and spawned a discussion online as well as several posts, including one by Jeff Jarvis.

In her talk, Bell contends journalists, who once controlled the determination and distribution of news, have lost their hold or maybe they’ve been supplanted. Their replacements? In digital channels, many editorial decisions are made by people fine-tuning algorithms or the algorithms themselves.

Martin says on the editorial front, we’ve traded one concentrated group of publicly-traded companies (media) for another (social networks as new media).

Gini says there’s so much info out there that until something’s been confirmed by the fourth estate, we tend not to believe it. Traditional media is the filter.

Joe contends PR is in an ideal position to bridge the gap between journalistic decision makers and the way algorithms pick content. And by seeing both sides of the coin, we can still help get news in front of people either though media or their feeds.

And that’s where understanding influence and influencers comes into play. Martin mentions a new type of influencer: a young video game player with an engaged audience who was featured in an article in the NYTimes. And the profession needs to refine its approach to public relationship-building to take this into account.

Are algorithms the new equivalent of editors – we don’t know who/what they are and yet they make many decisions? Is that a good or a bad thing? We’d love to hear what you think.

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.

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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.