Inside PR 438: The media world is spiky, not flat

April 10, 2016 • Martin • Inside PR, PR

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Martin here. And we’re all back.

We start this week with three #IPRMustKnows:

Gini talks about Facebook’s new mobile app, Moments, that searches your camera roll, groups photos together and asks if you want to send them privately to the people in the shots. You can also create Moments for events, vacations, etc. (Of course, it’s not yet available in Canada 🙁 .)

Joe discusses Facebook’s Media Central studio in NYC that coaches celebrities on how to use the platform and live video. He says good enough video isn’t good enough anymore and we should take video streaming seriously, not just wing it. Soon FB will up the ante when they let people broadcast high-quality live video that can be integrated into their own studio control room.

I mention PRSA Counselors Academy. This year, I’m chair of the organization and our annual conference for independent PR agency owners and leaders is May 1 to 3 in San Juan, Puerto Rico. There’s a fantastic program on the business of agency PR including a keynote on creativity from Disney’s Duncan Wardle. Here’s a link for more information or to register.

Our main topic this episode centres on the concentration of digital media and is based on The Game of Concentration by Joshua Benton, a story we read in the Niemen Lab Blog. The author makes the case that journalism used to be spread across North America because you needed a local newsroom to cover local news. With digital, you’d think that would create an even more distributed news world, but the high profile new media companies seem to be clustering in major markets like New York, Washington, LA or Silicon Valley, or Toronto, if you’re in Canada. Which means the media world is getting spikier and not flat. And that’s a challenge to both journalists and PR pros.

We’d love to know what you think.

What does the future hold for local media and PR practitioners?
Will people’s interest in the immediate world around them spark a resurgence of local stories and news?

Leave a comment on the blog, send us an email or an audio comment to [email protected], join the FIR Google+ Community, join the Inside PR Facebook group, 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 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 416: All the news you can get on Facebook and Twitter

July 17, 2015 • Martin • PR

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Martin here and I hope you don’t mind if I start with a plug. I’m heading to SXSWV2V in Las Vegas to be a mentor and on a panel called, The Best City in the World May Not Be a City at All. We’ll be talking about what it takes to make the kind of community people flock to live and work in and whether that’s a physical location, online or a creative combination of the two.

Now onto the show with our #IPRMustKnow for this week:

Meerkat introduces Cameo – a new feature that lets you hand off your livestream to other users and offer another angle on a real-time video story.

Twitter keeps getting better at paid promotion and rolls out campaign insights and audience personas to all users.

Facebook changes its settings and allows people to choose which friends and brands they want to see more of in their newsfeed. Have you adjusted yours?

In our main topic, we discuss a recent Pew Study that focuses on how and where we discover and consume news. Turns out 63% of people on both Facebook and Twitter get news from those platforms. Which helps explain why social networks continue to evolve into media companies.

One stat that stood out: just over 60 per cent of millennials get political news from Facebook and 37 per cent from local TV. The numbers are reversed for boomers. What does that mean? Well, don’t think that millennials will switch to TV when they become ‘mature adults’ – because, hey, that’s what adults are supposed to do. It’s yet another wake up call to mainstream media – and PR – on the need to evolve and transform.

And while we’re on the subject of media, do you get a newspaper delivered to your door? If so, how often do you read it? Where do you go first for information and news – social platforms or MSM?

We’d love to hear from you.

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 404: Media just keeps on changing…

March 17, 2015 • Martin • PR

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Martin here. And while this may be episode 404, we’re not sending you to a page like this…

Inside PR 404: Media just keeps on changing

On today’s show we talk about a couple of things: the ever-evolving media landscape and a new app that could turn citizen journalists into live TV reporters.

First – media: GigaOm, the tech analysis, publication announced it was shutting down. There’s been much written about them and why it happened. Here’s a quick recap:

That same week, the Toronto Star told readers it’s shuttering its paywall on April 1 and letting anyone access its online content free of charge.

We share our take on GigaOm, what it takes to run a business and how mainstream media’s trying to keep up.

Gini says it’s hard to figure out a workable paid content model and believes we’re on the brink of a content exhaustion point.

I suggest what we perceive success from the outside very differently than what you see when you’re inside and privy to the whole story.

Joe offers a business lesson and comments that venture capital doesn’t like slow and steady growth, but that you can build a business patiently and organically. He references Danny Sullivan’s post on Medium (shared above).

Then we chat about Meerkat, a live video streaming app where you send the feed directly to Twitter. In fact, Joe was testing it during our podcast but since the video is ephemeral, it disappears when you’re done, so you won’t find his feed.

Live streaming, of course, isn’t new. But the simplicity of using Meerkat means it could be a good tool for citizen journalists to witness events or capture breaking news. Have you tried it yet? What was your experience?

And what do you think about the state of media, social media and citizen journalism? We’d love to hear from you.

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 Ashlea McGrath.

Inside PR 401: On citizen journalism and PR

February 27, 2015 • Martin • PR, social media

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You could be one, so could your neighbour, colleague and friend. We’re talking about citizen journalists and, on today’s show, we discuss their place in the news cycle and how that affects PR.

Gini starts by recounting the story behind the first photo of the plane that crashed into the Hudson River in 2009, when Janis Krums, a bystander who watched it happen, took a picture, uploaded it to Twitter and the image went viral.

Joe discusses the nature of citizen journalism and says the photo was a snapshot – a one-time thing. He believes there’s a distinction between the act of witnessing and journalism, which involves editing, curation, analysis and context. A journalist’s focus should be to help people understand what a story means and that requires a more in-depth perspective.

I wonder about how citizen journalism is changing the nature of the scoop. Maybe that’s beyond a journalist’s domain and they need to rely on crowdsourcing breaking news from people who are there in real-time.

In our paid, earned, shared and owned landscape, PR people have to be resourceful about finding new ways to get their stories out there and engaging influencers.

Gini says her team approaches earned media from three angles and that includes citizen journalists. They target smaller, mid-level and influential publications and tailor the story so it resonates with each.

Final word from Joe: Look for the person who has something to say, covers a subject on a consistent basis and moves on to being a contributor to larger and more influential sources. Build relationships early and never ignore an individual if they’re intelligent, credible, trustworthy and can stick to it.

Here’s an interesting post by Mathew Ingram with examples of citizen journalism working well.

What do you think PR’s role is – or should be – with regards to engaging both citizen journalists and traditional media? We’d love to hear from you.

What do you think?

We’d ask one favor of you. 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 Ashlea McGrath.

Inside PR 3.46: Google introduces In-depth articles

September 20, 2013 • Martin • PR

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Earlier in the month, Gini wrote a blog post about Google’s In-depth articles. She discovered them when she was doing a search for a client and, in addition to the regular results, noticed a series of three other links listed at the bottom of the page.

She dug a bit deeper and found Google launched In-depth articles in August to feature longer-form content people are talking about – usually from mainstream media outlets. (Note: a search of ‘google in-depth articles’ did not include any in-depth articles, but did show Gini’s post.)

Recently Google has been using three elements to determine ranking: recency and relevancy, popularity and authority. Now, in combination with these measures, content creators should consider developing longer-form pieces like ebooks or white papers.

These are more reflective pieces that should demonstrate the writer has done their research, cited credible sources and has the authority to offer a perspective on the topic that adds value.

Agencies and organizations will want to experiment with longer-form articles to determine what works and how it affects the perception and discoverability of their brand.

Joe says it’s interesting to watch where search is heading and recalls that four or five years ago you would get really interesting links when you searched a topic. Now, in top-level searches he’s seeing is the equivalent of ‘network television’ – that is, links from larger outlets rather than the independent voices that often provided a fresh point of view.

Martin wonders whether this is Google’s way to re-legitimize media outlets as publishers and point people back to them.

For our Canadian listeners, In Depth Articles don’t work in Google.ca, so you’ll need to search in Google.com. Right now, it only seems to be for top-level searches.

Are these shifts toward more mainstream results harkening back to the brochure-ware websites we used to find online? What happened to the individual voices we know are out there? Will the average person understand how to refine their searches in order to find independent voices? What’s the impact on communicators who want to reach a wider audience?

We’d love to hear your ideas on where you think search is heading.

And as we mentioned, here’s the link to the new subscription-based ‘Netflix for books’ app, Oyster.

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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 #134 – Wednesday, October 22, 2008

October 22, 2008 • Terry • gary schlee, Inside PR, Media relations, PR, Show Notes, social media

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Comments? Send us an email or an audio comment to [email protected], visit the Inside PR Blubrry site, or leave us a comment on the Inside PR show blog.

This week on Inside PR David Jones and Martin Waxman discuss how to go about obtaining media and/or PR publicity as a small business.

Show Notes

00:26 Martin opens the show.

01:29 Martin mentions that Talk is Cheap, Centennial College‘s unconference is back in Toronto on November 12 and Inside PR will be recording a show at the conference in front of an audience.

02:31 Dave mentions Gary Schlee, who used to run the Talk is Cheap program.

07:53 Dave discusses the wiki he set up: socialmediacasestudies.wetpaint.com.

08:05 Dave mentions Peter Kim and his blog, with a list of (originally) 234 social media marketing examples and how it gave him the idea for his wiki.

09:39 Dave mentions people such as Maggie Fox at Social Media Group and Kate Trgovac who have provided social media marketing examples and links in the right way.

11:00 Martin talks to blogger relations.

11:16 Dave talks to blogger relations.

13:16 Dave gives a hat tip to Peter Kim and Dave Fleet. Dave started the Social Media Training Wiki on Wet Paint last year.

14:10 Martin introduces the show topic: How to go about obtaining media and/or PR publicity as a small business.

15:55 Dave mentions that you have to ask yourself if you are “F.B.O.” (the First, Best or Only). You have to ask yourself what your story is and how you are unique.

20:20 Martin discusses how to reach the people you want to reach (such as media people).

24:46 Dave discusses having modest expectations.

26:49 Dave mentions Mabel’s Labels, a company started by two women, that makes very durable labels for kids clothes, and how their mention on The View created word-of-mouth popularity for them.

28:10 Martin talks about trends.

30:17 Dave mentions the CBC show Dragon’s Den, where people come in and pitch their business ideas to potential investors.

31:45 Dave discusses another good idea to getting media/PR publicity; getting in touch with someone in the industry.

32:54 Dave summarizes the five ways small business can get publicity for themselves: 1) Figure out what your story is 2) Who do you want to reach? 3) Refine your pitch 4) Have modest expectations 5) Learn and recalibrate.

33: 39 Dave closes the show.

Our theme music is Streetwalker by Cjacks and is courtesy of the Podsafe Music Network; Roger Dey is our announcer.

This week’s episode was produced by Janna Guberman.