Inside PR 3.27: The story on content

March 14, 2013 • Martin • PR

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This week we feature video interviews we did at meshmarketing conference in Toronto. Our guests are three content marketing strategists – well, two strategists and one creative artist: Kristina Halvorson, Lee Odden and David Usher.

Here are some highlights:

Kristina Halvorson – Brands need to care about content more than ever because that’s what drives their relationships with customers online… Brands should ensure they look at content not at a commodity but as a business asset.

Lee Odden – Content is the perfect medium for storytelling, it’s what helps brands stand out beyond the noise… Think about online marketing as a peanut and jelly sandwich, search is the PB, jelly’s the social media and content is the bread that holds it all together.

David Usher – Content is very important to brands these days because it defines the brand. If you take the word brand and replace it with personality, it’s really the same thing… You need authenticity and originality and those are the two things that make content engaging.

Gini, Joe and Martin talk about the interviews and how each of us thinks about content. We agree you don’t need to have a big budget to create meaningful and sharable social objects. You need a great story to tell to people who are genuinely interested. And that’s where relationships and creativity come in.

What are some of your content marketing ideas secrets? We’d love to hear from you.

And if you liked these interviews, you may want to check out the great lineup of speakers at Mesh 2013 in Toronto in May. And yes, that’s another Inside PR video on the homepage :).

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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, Joe 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.

Gini recommends a content audit and talks about things that can be repurposed and optimize it so it reaches. You don’t always have to create something new, you need to use what you already have in other collateral.

Takes pieces of a PDF white paper that isn’t searchable and creates nuggets that are searchable from existing content.

Content as a business asset and spoke that it’s meaningful and engaging and the issue of high quality is interesting with social objects.

What are some of your content secrets? We’d love to hear from you.

Inside PR 3.25: Roy Reid on Outrageous Trust

February 14, 2013 • admin • PR

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It’s Valentine’s Day and while we certainly don’t know the secret to romance, we do know that no real relationship can survive without trust.

And that brings us to today’s topic. We caught up with Roy Reid, APR, one of the partners in Consensus Communications, at the PRSA International Conference in San Francisco. Roy had just given a presentation on trust – well, actually he went beyond simple trust to describe something he called outrageous trust.

Here are three actions Roy recommends to achieve outrageous trust:

1. Take responsibility for the relationship.

2. Build from the inside out. That means always acting with integrity and producing excellent work.

3. Be consistent in your communications.

Gini references the 2013 Edelman Trust Barometer and the fact that while trust in organizations is no longer falling, it’s still low. She agrees with Roy and says you can’t be trustworthy externally unless you’re trustworthy internally too.

Joe mentions Naked Conversations and the notion that we trust people we know and can talk to and are generally skeptical of business. And if organizations haven’t spent the time to engage with their community, they won’t have much credibility or support when a crisis occurs.

We go on to talk about two recent online crises in the restaurant industry, at Smith and Wollensky (scroll to the end to read what the police had to say) and the tipping brouhaha at Applebee’s.

What do you think organizations need to do to attain the state of outrageous trust with their customers and communities?

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Inside PR video interviews with Shonali Burke and Shel Holtz

January 26, 2013 • Martin • PR

As many of you know, we’ve been doing video interviews since this summer in partnership with PRSA and Mesh. And we’ve had an opportunity to talk with some really smart and insightful people.

So we thought we’d share the video portions of the conversations we had with Shonali Burke and Shel Holtz at the 2012 PRSA International Conference. We featured the audio in IPR 3.15 and 3.16

And while you’re at it, check out our new Inside PR YouTube channel. We’ll be doing more interviews in 2013 so as they say in TV land…stay tuned.

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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. Inside PR is produced by Kristine Simpson.

Inside PR 3.22: Looking at the year ahead

January 9, 2013 • admin • PR

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Well, it’s January 2013 and we thought we’d start the year with some upcoming projects and a list of the conferences we’re planning to attend.

Projects:

Gini’s writing her second book, aptly titled Spin Sucks: The Book. It’s about the general perception that PR is made up of a bunch of spin doctors and what we can do to restore the industry’s reputation and perform our jobs ethically and honestly. In other words: how to ‘Fight Against Destructive Spin’.

Joe and the Thornley Fallis team are working on an ebook entitled, The User’s Guide to Social Media Listening and Engagement Tools, a marketing and communications industry resource. Twenty-two platforms will be reviewed and rated and individual sections will be published as blog posts.

Martin mentions he’s gearing up for the new University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies Digital Strategy and Communications Management Certificate program. The first class, a Foundations course, starts on January 23 and is almost full. Future plans include offering the Certificate courses online. Stay tuned…

And speaking of online courses, Gini is one of the presenters in the Content Success Summit presented by Social Media Examiner. And Joe and Shel Holtz are offering an Integrated Social Media Course through IABC beginning on January 17.

Conferences we’re looking forward to/speaking at:

BlogH.O.T., March 25 to 27, Los Angeles

PRSA Western District Conference, April 18 to 20, Phoenix

Ragan 22nd Annual Corporate Communicators Conference, April 29 to May 1, Chicago

Mesh conference, May 15 and 16, Toronto

PRSA Counselors Academy Conference, June 9 to 11, Austin

CPRS National Conference, June 9 to 11, Ottawa

IABC 2013 World Conference, June 23 to 26, New York

PRSA Digital Impact, June 27 and 28, New York

PRSA International Conference, October 26 to 29, Philadelphia

There are lots more places to learn and keep your digital and social media skills finely tuned. We’d love to hear about what you’re looking forward to.

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Inside PR 3.17: On content marketing and extreme reuse

November 30, 2012 • admin • PR

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This week, our episode is short, but sweet (well, we can at least guarantee the first part). We recorded this show before US Thanksgiving and Gini’s trip to Amsterdam to give a talk to the PR community there. We’ll hear about her adventures next show.

We continue our discussion on producing and sharing remarkable content and Joe mentions an article Aaron Dun wrote for Marketing Profs on why creating a single blog post on a particular subject is no longer good enough. You need to learn how to re-purpose your content – in a major way.

Dun recommends an approach he calls ‘extreme reuse’, that is building out and spreading one idea across multiple platforms. He suggests you start by considering everything you do as fodder for content, whether it’s a call with clients, a brainstorm, an article you read, a conversation, trends… Then figure out how you can take your concept and adapt it to other channels including blog posts, slides, webinars, Google hangouts, infographics, video, email marketing, etc.

Gini talks about all the content she creates – and how she doesn’t know where she’ll find the time to do any more…

That’s where having a talented and diverse team comes in. In order for extreme reuse to be effective, organizations need people with different areas of expertise to add their perspective to a story and bring it to life in various media.

Martin suggests we should also look at things strategically and realize not every idea is a big enough to merit that much reuse. So be selective.

Is content marketing something you can do on your own or do you need partners who are good at other things and who can create a series of social objects around a subject or a theme?

We’d love to hear what you think.

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Inside PR 3.16: Measurement – Shonali Burke style

November 22, 2012 • admin • PR

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Martin recaps meshmarketing 12. Among his highlights are singer/songwriter David Usher’s creative presentation that combined storytelling, images, video, and illustrating his points in song; and Kristina Halvorson’s observation that much of what passes for content on websites is online garbage. She urges us to start thinking more strategically and stop polluting. Watch for the upcoming video interviews we’re producing with Lee Odden, Kristina Halvorson and David Usher.

This week, we feature a PRSA International Conference interview with Shonali Burke, VP, Digital and Marketing at MSL Washington and creator of the Waxing Unlyrical blog. Shonali talks about one of her favourite topics: measurement and why it’s important to communicators.

She advises us to shift our mindsets from output to outcome and embed this type of thinking into our programs in order to demonstrate how our work actually achieves business goals.

She encourages communicators to perform measurement tests and present the results to clients as a way to educate them on how PR and social media programs can correlate to business outcomes.

Looking ahead, Shonali thinks we must all pay more attention to measurement and understanding analytics ; we should focus on storytelling – that is going back to what PR is really about and; we must learn how to become community managers and tell our stories directly to the audiences we’re trying to reach.

It’s always a real pleasure catching up with Shonali!

And on behalf of Gini, Joe, Kristine and me, we want to wish all our American friends a very Happy Thanksgiving!

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Inside PR 3.13: The importance of participating in real life

October 26, 2012 • admin • PR

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It’s fall and, like many of you, we’re on the learning circuit. Now, I’m not talking about formal post-secondary education (of course, that’s valuable too). I mean attending conferences and events, gaining insights from speakers and meeting new people. We were recently at the PRSA International Conference in San Francisco and will be featuring audio and video interviews we did over the next few weeks.

And, on November 7 we’ll be at meshmarketing in Toronto to talk to more thought-leaders and digital innovators.

On this week’s show, we discuss some of our PRSA highlights and feature an interview with Kristina Halvorson, CEO of Brain Traffic, and one of the keynote speakers at meshmarketing.

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This year’s conference was filled with standout content and lots of lively interaction between sessions. Highlights include a keynote by Twitter founder Biz Stone, who said ‘creativity is a renewable resource’, sessions on story marketing, a panel let by the CEOs of several major PR agencies looking at where the business is heading and presentations by Lee Odden, Shonali Burke, Shel Holtz.

One takeaway Joe observed is that we’re living in a post-social-media world and looking at a PR industry that’s positioning itself to compete with advertising and digital. We’re interested to hear your thoughts on how the profession is evolving.

Kristina Halvorson: content as a complicated beast

According to Kristina, the web is content. That’s one of the primary reasons we go online, whether to consume or create content. Businesses are waking up to the fact that we need to be focusing our time and energy on it – and it’s not easy; content is a complicated beast.

That’s because many organizations aren’t properly structured to identify the kind of content that’s needs to be created, how it’s all going to work together, who’s going to develop it, where it’s going to be published and who’s going to maintain it over time.

She believes companies need to start by having a group therapy session; a series of candid conversations where they can share their challenges and work toward a shared solution to create a more effective content strategy with clear goals.

You’ll be able to hear more from Kristina – and Lee Odden – at meshmarketing.

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Inside PR 3.11: We’re baaaack…

October 13, 2012 • admin • PR

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Well, it’s fall 2012, our extended summer vacation is over and we’re excited to be starting a new season of Inside PR.

We hope you’ve enjoyed our collection of interviews and want to thank our listeners for being patient and to welcome all of you back.

This week, we catch up by mentioning a few of the changes that have happened since our last recording including the fact that Google has eclipsed Microsoft as the second largest technology company by market cap. Byng is getting closer to Facebook and that’s making it a more relevant search engine. And Twitter’s closing the gates to their API and leaving some of the developers who’ve helped build the service behind.

As many of you know, Gini has just finished 25 weeks on the road, launching her new book, Marketing in the Round and she talks about some of the things she’s learned.

She said she was most surprised by the length of the process – a full year to sign a contract, write, edit, publish a book and then another few months for people to start reading and talking about it and for the authors to know if they’re making an impact. That’s very different from the instant gratification we get from blog posts and online social interactions.

She also found traditional sales measurement lacking. It takes a couple of weeks to receive reports and they only track hardcover sales and not special sales or ebooks. She says she’s used to working in a fast-paced world and publishing is more traditional and slower.

So what’s on the horizon for Inside PR? We’re happy to be partnering with PRSA again. Joe and Martin will be at the International Conference recording video and audio interviews with some of the speakers and thought leaders. Martin’s also presenting a session called Social Media Barometer. So if you’re there, please say hi.

We’re also excited to be sponsoring MeshMarketing 2012 in Toronto. We’ll be talking to some of the presenters including Kristina Halvorson and the organizing team and will be roving reporters at the event – which always features innovative thinkers in the social and digital space.

And we’re interested to hear from you and any ideas you have about what you’d like us to discuss.

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Inside PR 3.05: June Cotte, PRSA International Conference keynoter, on ethical consumption

August 27, 2012 • admin • PR

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This week, Martin talks with PRSA International Conference keynote speaker, June Cotte, associate professor at the Richard Ivey School of Business in London, Ontario and the school’s George and Mary Turnbull Fellow.

Professor Cotte studies consumer behavioural and purchase issues, also the subject of her presentation, ‘When Will Consumers Pay to Be Good’.

Cotte and her colleagues conduct research on socially conscious consumption including recent experiments where consumers are exposed to certain purchase conditions and then asked to respond in order to determine how and why people behave the way they do and when they’ll pay more for ethically produced products.

In addition to paying a premium for ethically produced products, she found consumers will penalize brands by paying a lower price for goods when a company’s corporate behaviour is in question. Consumer attitudes are cyclical and Cotte observed that ethical consumption was important in the ‘70s though less so in the ‘80s and ‘90s. The current prevailing sentiment toward socially responsible behavior began to emerge again in the 2000s. She contends a cultural zeitgeist drives the change and that is where PR can come in, to explain the story and the benefits of an organization’s positive behaviour to consumers. This is especially important in an economic downturn where price becomes more of a consideration.

And because firms can get into trouble when they oversell a claim, communicators can help organizations strike a balance between explaining what they’re doing and the effect it has and help them deliver the story in the right tone.

It’s a fascinating study and you can hear more at the PRSA International Conference, October 13 to 16, 2012 in San Francisco.

Gini, Joe and Martin will also be at the conference and we look forward to meeting you there.

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Our theme music was created by Damon de Szegheo; Roger Dey is our announcer. Inside PR is produced by Kristine Simpson.

Inside PR 3.03: The gang’s in Toronto

August 15, 2012 • admin • PR

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When we record our ‘one-track-pony’, Gini, Joe and Martin are all in Toronto and about to watch Gini talk about her new book, Marketing in the Round at Third Tuesday Toronto. Here’s a link to the event Twitter feed on Storify.

The night before Gini was at Third Tuesday Ottawa and the following day, she and co-author Geoff Livingston are at Social Mix 2012. Busy? Why would you ask?

This week’s topic centres on the post Gini wrote about Ryan Holiday’s new book, Trust Me, I’m Lying. Holiday claims he’s a media manipulator. To prove it, he and his assistant conducted a test where they posed as sources and responded to reporters who were looking for experts to quote in articles. Holiday made up lies that were included in various publications. He claimed this demonstrated how few media do their homework and how easy it is to bamboozle them with false information.

The three of us agree this is unethical behavior that casts a shadow on the communications industry and reinforces negative stereotypes about PR that, in the majority of cases, just aren’t true.

Joe says that in journalism and PR mistakes do happen or something falls through the cracks, but that’s the exception and not the rule and that Ryan is a publicity-seeking outlier who’s out to sell books.

The situation reminds Martin of P.T. Barnum, a promoter and publicist (among other things), who would do anything to get attention. But it runs counter to our industry and the ethics many of us practice every day.

Gini contends it’s not unlike the get rich quick schemes that people fall for and wonders if you need to lie to succeed.

Have a listen to our discussion and let us know what you think.

This is our last recording of the summer. But we’re not going on a full hiatus. We’re featuring podcast interviews from PRSA Silver Anvils, Social Capital Conference, PRSA International conference and more. We’ll be back with our regularly scheduled programming mid-September.

So stay tuned… And thanks for listening!

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