Inside PR 364: Our PR loves

• • PR

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Martin here.

Because we recorded this episode on Valentine’s Day, we decided to talk about our PR loves – as in the tools that help us do our jobs better – not the people. The idea came from a Spin Sucks post by Gini and her team.

Martin’s loves:

  • Twitter for connecting, sharing/curating, sending quick messages and generally finding out what’s trending.
  • Evernote – the place where I keep all my notes, random thoughts, blog posts, ideas and to do lists. They’re organized, searchable and accessible on whatever device I happen to be on.

Joe’s loves (two pairs):

  • Feedly for news, tagging and follow-up and Diigo to store, annotate and keep track of posts he wants to reference later. Joe says that as communications professionals, we need to have the facts at hands when writing and both these platforms help with that.
  • Buffer and Hootsuite to schedule and share stories easily.

Gini’s loves:

  • Talkwalker, a new app that works like Google alerts. Gini likes it even more since its Hootsuite integration, which lets you schedule or tweet out alerts.
  • Scrivener the app Gini uses for writing books and other long-form content. Not only does it help keep you organized, it develops your table of contents and index, and it’s searchable so you can easily find various parts of a manuscript during your writing.

What are the tools you love that make your day easier?

We end the show with a question from Daniel Francavilla, a student of mine who owns his own design business. Daniel wondered about the importance of design and visual identity in communications.

Joe says (and we all agree) that it’s often the differentiator. We’ve gone from a world where the big choice used to be selecting a template in Word to one where design is integral to our work and the people who want to be competitive are those who design for a multimedia experience.

Thanks Daniel.

One quick reminder: For anyone in Toronto and Ottawa – the next Third Tuesday features data analyst Jim Sterne on the human side of analytics – #3TYYZ February 26 in Toronto and #3TYOW February 27 in Ottawa. Hope to see you there. And here’s Jim Sterne’s song parody, Modern Data Analyst.

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We’d love to hear your thoughts.

Inside PR is part of the FIR Podcast Network.

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.

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 Kristine D’Arbelles and Ashlea LeCompte.

Inside PR 3.42: Our take on the Publicis Omnicom merger

• • 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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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 2.81: On Google, Twitter and Marketing in the Round

• • PR

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First:
Listener comments responding to our discussion on ‘mean girls in PR’… Thanks to Jessica Suter from The Change PR, Lizanor Barrera and our own producer, Kristine Simpson, who submitted an audio comment (and graciously edited it in). The consensus from everyone is there are a lot of good, honest and ethical women and men working in the profession (and yes, there are a few stinkers, too…).

Next:
We officially announce Gini’s new book, Marketing in the Round, co-authored with Geoff Livingston. The publication date is May 2012, but it’s available to pre-order on Amazon and other sites (just in time for the holidays).  It will be launched in Canada at Third Tuesday (Toronto, Ottawa, Calgary and Vancouver).  Congratulations, Gini!

Then:
We move on to talk about some recent changes to Twitter and Google.

Joe sees the new features/updates as an example of how innovation is still occurring rapidly in social media; Twitter is looking more and more like a user friendly service.  Martin admits he still likes the Twitter.com platform because he feels at home there.

Joe is disappointed by the changes to Tweetdeck, because it has fewer features and will now carry only Twitter and none of his other social feeds. He’s going to revisit Hootsuite.

Gini mentions Market Me Suite as another alternative.

Martin says he’s been a Hootsuite user for a while and likes the functionality. He wishes they would let users customize column width in order to see more streams at a glance.

Google introduced Currents, a magazine reader (not yet available in Canada) and is integrating Gmail with the Google+ platform.

Joe likes the quality of the interaction on Google+. He says you can describe Google+ as a place you go for ideas, Facebook, as a place to interact with friends and Twitter where you find out what’s going on. Within that model there’s lots of room for each platform to survive and thrive.

But what about LinkedIn?  Martin believes many LinkedIn features could be integrated into Google+ to make it a good business networking and information resource.

Joe feels too many people on LinkedIn are promoting themselves as they look for jobs; what’s missing is the culture of generosity.

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We’d love to hear from you.

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

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

This week’s episode was produced by Kristine Simpson.

Inside PR 2.48 – A big week for Salesforce and Radian6, Google +1 and April Fools!

• • measurement, PR, Shownotes

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Martin Waxman, Gini Dietrich and I are back for another episode of Inside PR.

This week, we talk about the implications of the Radian6 acquisition by Salesforce.com and the launch of Google +1.

Oh. And April Fools didn’t pass us by either. Gini gives a big shoutout to HootSuite ‘s  Angry Owls prank and Martin is looking forward to connecting with Ernest Hemingway on LinkedIn. And along the way, Joe gets reorganized into a spare office – if one is available.

The big news this week was the announcement that Salesforce.com would pay $323 million to acquire social media analytics company Radian6. This is an interesting acquisition for the valuation, of course. But even more-so for what it may signal about the evolution of social media monitoring and analysis services. We take a close look at the implications of the Salesforce-Radian6 deal.

Finally, Gini kicks off our discussion of Google +1 with the question, “What does it feel like to be a me-too product when you used to be ruler of the world?” Fighting words?

Do you have comments? Send us an email or an audio comment to [email protected], join the Inside PR Facebook group, leave us a comment here, message us @inside_pr on Twitter, or connect with Gini Dietrich, Joe Thornley, and Martin Waxman on Twitter.

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

And a BIG WELCOME to the new producer of Inside PR: Kristine Simpson. You’re a brave person Kristine. 🙂

UPDATE: I’ve written a longer post on ProPR.ca about the implications of the Radian6-Salesforce, Finally, a means of measuring the ROI of social media?