Inside PR 423: Has Big Tech Become Too Powerful?

September 24, 2015 • Martin • Inside PR, PR

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We’re back after a brief end of summer hiatus and start off with this week’s #IPRMustKnow segment.

Martin: Signal, Facebook’s new app for FB and Instagram, gives journalists a set of tools to discover breaking news, curate visuals and stories and share them on various platforms.

Gini: Google and Twitter have teamed up to provide an open-source competitor to Facebook’s Instant Articles, a place for publishers to display breaking news on mobile.

Joe – How do you spell Google Reader? Apple News. Joe gives an overview of the much-touted app. He likes the visual interface but doesn’t think it’s a replacement for an RSS reader yet. And he offers a quick hack on how to get the app if you’re not in the U.S. – but you’ll have to listen to the show to get it :).

And our talk of the big three – Apple, Google and Facebook – brings us to our main topic: a New York Times op-ed by Berkeley prof Robert Reich called, Big Tech Has Become Way Too Powerful. Reich contends Facebook, Google and Apple have too much influence over the government and regulators and the way we discover news and content.

Listen for our discussion. And please send your thoughts. We’re interested to hear what you think.

We end by answering a question Barbara Nixon posed on Facebook and Twitter: ‘What should new PR pros expect and prepare for when interviewing for an entry-level PR position?’

Gini wants to hear where people see themselves in five years and where their career path is heading.

Joe tries to have a conversation with potential hires to see if the person can exchange ideas with him, and if they fit into a culture of creativity and curiosity.

Martin suggests searching the company to find out about the principals, how they think, and what their culture is. And then search yourself to see if there are any red flags.

Any other suggestions? We’d love to hear from you.

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.

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 420: Neville Hobson Hangs Up His Mic

August 19, 2015 • Martin • PR

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This week, we have something special: Joe’s interview with Neville Hobson, co-host of the Hobson & Holtz Report and one of the first PR podcasters.

But first, our #InsidePRMustKnow segment.

Martin: The social news distribution space is getting a little more crowded. Facebook’s adding a Twitteresque app to let publishers send out breaking news alerts.

Joe: An academic study shows that what works for marketing – good SERP – also will affect voting decisions in elections. Something for us all to be aware of and vigilant about. Also, helps understand the concern of European authorities over the dominant share of search held there by Google.

Gini: How do you drive more traffic to a podcast? Eden Spodek, who’s launching her own podcast in a few weeks, suggests posting the audio and an image to YouTube and Gini tried that. We’ll let you know what happens.

Now onto Joe’s conversation with Neville …

As you’ve probably heard, Neville is leaving the FIR Network after 10 years and tells us he’s going to be focusing on creating more written content. In a wide-ranging discussion, he takes us on a journey that begins with the early days of podcasting, or as he calls it ‘home brew radio’. Neville tells stories about what he’s observed and learned along the way. He mentions some of the people who inspired him and shares his thoughts on what makes a podcaster great (hint – curiosity).

And speaking of podcasting… Just a reminder that we kick off our #InsidePRBookClub next week with a discussion of The Business of Podcasting by Donna Papacosta and Steve Lubetkin. We hope you’ll read it and share your thoughts.

We’d love to hear from you.

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 419: The Internet is Dead

August 12, 2015 • Gini Dietrich • PR

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In this week’s edition of #IPRMustKnow, we discuss:

It is the end of an era. Neville Hobson hangs up the podcasting kit after a decade on air.
Spin really does suck when apps are called “social sharing,” but they really are shrewd business owners, you know we’re in trouble.
Facebook has been approved for a patent that will allow lenders to review the credit scores of your friends before approving you for a loan.

And the main topic of this week’s show…

With the news of Zirtual closing shop, seemingly overnight, Gawker taking down stories, the Reddit interim CEO stepping down based on the social media mob, and journalists writing stories that just aren’t based in fact, Vox is claiming the Internet is dead.

Here is what they have to say:

What links these seemingly dissimilar stories is a very basic fear — the idea that the internet as we knew it, the internet of five or 10 or 20 years ago, is going away as surely as print media, replaced by a new internet that reimagines personal identity as something easily commodified, that plays less on the desire for information or thoughtfulness than it does the desire for a quick jolt of emotion.

It’s an internet driven not by human beings, but by content, at all costs. And none of us — neither media professionals, nor readers — can stop it. Every single one of us is building it every single day.

We encourage you to read the Vox piece, listen to the episode, and come back here to discuss.

We’d love to hear from you.

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 418: The IPR Book Club

August 10, 2015 • thornley • Show Notes

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Joseph Thornley here. On this week’s Inside PR, Gini Dietrich, Martin Waxman and I talk about Gini’s experiment reposting older content and some of the trends in blogging and publishing that it pointed to.

Also, this week, we launch the Inside PR Book Club #IPRBookClub. Each month, we will ask the Inside PR community to suggest a book that they would like to discuss with us. We’ll name the book at the beginning of the month and then take two or three weeks to read it. As we do this, we’ll invite our listeners to read the book as well. And then, most importantly, we’ll ask you to share with us your impressions of the book. What was most useful? What rang true? What missed? We’ll ask you to submit your impressions as comments on the IPR blog. Or even better, we’ll ask you to send us audio comments to the [email protected] email address. Then we’ll collect your comments and our own impressions and put together a special Inside PR episode in which we discuss the book. And I mean WE. Because we plan to play your audio comments and read the comments you leave on the Inside PR blog. Yes, we’re going to not just review books but make this a real book club with all of us taking part in the discussion.

For our first book, we’re going to talk about something that should be of interest to the podcaster in all of us, The Business of Podcasting by Donna Papacosta and Steve Lubetkin. This is a brand new book by two podcasters who share with us the lessons they have each learned in over a decade of experience in podcasting. It’s a short read – perhaps two hours time. Full of tips and examples. You can get your copy from Amazon.

We also have our #IPRMustKnow segment. This week, we tell you about three things we think you should be sure to note:

The New York Times is reinventing the way it presents advertisements on mobile devices;

Facebook marches on. They now can claim 1.49 BILLION monthly active users. Facebook, he Internet for most of us.

Gini points us to an article of useful tips to ensure that we stay on the right side of the law with our visual storytelling.

We do this for you. And we’d love to hear from you.

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 413: A Swift Response to Intellectual Property

June 26, 2015 • Martin • PR

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This week we put on our pop music hats and talk about intellectual property and Taylor Swift.

But first #IPRMustKnow:

Google launches YouTube Newswire to verify breaking video news in real-time. Is the newswire about to be crowdsourced?

Speaking of news…Twitter announces Project Lightning, a curated source for news and major events, assembled by the Twitter media team (i.e. people not algorithms).

And…NYTimes temporarily blocks its homepage access from employees in an effort to help journalists better understand their readers who are accessing their news via smartphones and tablets and not from the virtual front page.

Taylor versus Goliath?

Taylor Swift stood up for independent artists and their right to be paid. And Apple Music, which was offering a three-month free trial to users subsidized by not paying royalties to artists, backed down. Swift argued that she personally doesn’t need the money, but independent artists shouldn’t have to lose the equivalent of one-quarter of their income to a profitable corporation like Apple.

Apple is an organization that has gone a long way to define its brand and design aesthetic and cultivated a loyal following. The company quickly realized that when people are deciding which music service to subscribe to, they’d rather be on the side that plays fair, not the one that’s seen to be taking advantage of artists.

Apple made its about-face after listening and being open to Taylor Swift’s POV. Swift is showing herself as a powerful social media force. And she’s smart about the way she does her own PR by creating opportunities for fans and building loyalty and engagement.

The bottom line: You may have to give away some content for free but profitable organizations should value intellectual property and not think of it as license to make money on the backs of creators.

And check out Gini’s rant on the high cost of the free economy!

We’d love to hear 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 Ashlea McGrath.