Inside PR 507: GDPR Last Call

• • Show Notes

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We have lots to talk about on this week’s Inside PR podcast.

PRSA Counselors Academy

Martin returned from attending Counselors Academy last week in Toronto. And he tells us about some of the personal highlights. We’ve said it before, Counselor’s Academy is a unique gathering of PR agency principals that mixes both best communications practices with best business practices. A conference well worth attending.

No Klout

The demise of Klout. We won’t spill any tears. And it’s still a precautionary tale about the danger of trusting a measurement of index which refuses to publish the factors and calculations that are used to derive it.

GDPR Last Call

Last call. This is deadline week for General Data Protection Regulations. Final warning. This may be a European law, but it can be applied to any Website that gathers data from Europeans. Be sure that you are in compliance with GDPR.

Don’t give up on constructive conversation on social media

There’s a lot of toxicity in social media discussions and comments. However, not everyone is giving up on the potential of social media to give voice to intelligent and constructive conversation. News this week of a project out of Simon Fraser University to to develop algorithms that would identify the most constructive, well-supported comments and raise their visibility. This type of development offers hope to anyone who is attempting to curate and moderate online conversations. We need more of this.

A course to get you started podcasting

If you’re listening to this podcast, you know how effective on demand media is to reach an audience with specialized interests. And you probably know something that others would like to share. So, why not think about creating your own podcast to share. If you’re thinking about doing this, Martin has a new podcast course on Lynda.com. A great place to start. And if you do start your own podcast, plesae let us know and we will promote it on Inside PR.

Gini Dietrich launches the Spin Sucks podcast

And speaking of new podcasts, Gini Dietrich is launching a Spin Sucks podcast. If you know Gini, you know this will be an outstanding podcast. So, hop over to iTunes and subscribe now.

Linkworthy

It’s your turn.

We’d love to know what you think about the topics we discussed as well as your suggestions for questions you’d like answered or topics for future shows.

#IPRMustKnow

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Subscribe on the podcast app of your choice

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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.
Creative Commons Licence
Inside PR 507 by Joseph Thornley, Gini Dietrich, Martin Waxman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Inside PR 365: MasterCard ties one on, Facebook going mobile and the New Klout

• • Inside PR, PR

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Gini Dietrich and I do a two-hander in this episode as Martin is on a train with only spotty online access.

This week we talk about MasterCard’s aggressive PR tactics around the Brit Awards, more evidence that we’re all going mobile and the New Klout.

MasterCard ties one on

Gini pointed to MasterCard’s efforts to tie  coverage of MasterCard to access to the Brit Awards. Dominic Ponsford detailed exactly what happened, from the PR company’s suggestion that access would be tied to agreement to mention MasterCard through the reactions to the Twitter backlash.

Ponsford published the text of an email to a reporter in which MasterCard’s PR company asked reporters to agree to tweet MasterCard messages in their feeds. The PR company went so far as to suggest content for tweets before, during and after the event:

Pre event – e.g. Really excited to be heading down to @BRITAwards tonight with @MasterCardUK #PricelessSurprises

Event night – live tweeting from the event including @MasterCardUK handle and #PricelessSurprises and to retweet @MasterCardUK tweets throughout the night where appropriate

Post event – tweet directing followers to @MasterCardUK BRITs YouTube videos

Needless to say, this prompted a backlash, with Twitter comments like this:

The managing director of the PR agency didn’t back down, arguing that:

“The role of the PR agency is to pursue all coverage opportunities on behalf of its clients. This includes providing accurate brand references from the outset, for use across all platforms. It is a two-way conversation between the journalist and the PR in order to reach a mutually beneficial outcome. Editorial control always remains with the journalist.”

Gini and I discuss our views about this type of tactic. Gini sees this as an illustration of the fine line between legitimately promoting an event and the questionable offering of a benefit for coverage.

I see it as a clear example of tied coverage. “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. You give me reference to my client and I will give you access to the awards.”  Yes we have seen this before. Think of auto journalists flown to exotic locations to review new cars. But in recent years, the trend has been against these kinds of junkets, with many news organizations telling their staff to refuse the benefits. “You can’t blame a guy for trying. But you can blame the other guy for playing along.”

What do you think of MasterCard’s media relations approach? Too cheeky? Or taking fair advantage of the an opportunity. Or somewhere in between.

Canadians go mobile with Facebook

The world truly is going mobile. New stats out of Facebook Canada indicate that Facebook Canada is making more money on mobile devices than on PCs and stationary devices. Of Facebook’s nineteen million Canadian users, ten million check their Facebook account once a day via mobile versus only four million who check it daily from non-mobile devices like desktops.

To me, this just underscores the importance of think mobile first. If you are thinking about communicating with people primarily in front of PCs or laptops, you’re failing to follow the audience where they’ve actually gone. They are looking at the mobile devices in their hand.

Gini cautions against following an overall trend without looking at your specific circumstance. In her experience, many sectors are lagging behind in the move to mobile, with many of her clients’ sites continuing to receive the majority of their traffic from desktop applications. It’s important that you know where your traffic is coming from. So check your analytics.

A New (Improved?) Klout

And finally, we discuss the new Klout. Gini finds it useful, because it surfaces content from people with whom she already engages. Gini also finds the measurement tab to be useful in that it’s suggests which individual pieces of content have generated the greatest engagement. For my part, I find the metrics to be even more dumbed down than they used to be and of the dubious value. It appears to me that Klout is positioning itself as a tool to assist content creators in competition with established players like HootSuite or Buffer.

What do you think? Is the new Klout a step forward or moved to irrelevance?

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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 3.43: Online Security for PR Pros

• • 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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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.