Inside PR 3.49: Jay Baer wants companies to be more useful

• • PR

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | RSS

[display_podcast]

We’ve talked to author, digital strategist and speaker extraordinaire Jay Baer on Inside PR a few times before. In fact, the first time was after the 2009 PRSA Counselors Academy Conference in Palm Springs that Jay references in the beginning of his new book, Youtility: Why Smart Marketing is About Help, Not Hype (highly recommended by Martin).

Jay is the closing keynote at Meshmarketing conference in Toronto on November 7, so we thought this is a good time to catch up with him and discuss what’s new.

Jay defines youtility, the theme of his book, as creating marketing that has so much intrinsic value people would pay for it. He says many companies are embracing this principle because it helps them break through the clutter we face today.

He encourages businesses to ‘market their marketing’ by developing a launch strategy for their content that leads people to it.

The competitive landscape has altered the information we consume into a mashup of personal and professional sources and Jay he believes businesses need to develop relationships with customers that are similar to the relationship people have with their friends. He calls that friend of mine awareness.

Jay says the PR industry, which became active in social media early on because it understood the importance of stories and relationships, now has to change the way it executes and move from being talkers to skilled makers of content like infographics, videos and white papers. Most PR agencies don’t have makers on staff and have to outsource too much of that work.

Joe experienced the concept of Youtility last week and references a number of blog posts from trusted sources on what we need to know about the new Google algorithm; he received useful information in real-time that helped him.

Gini is surprised businesses are still not creating launch plans for marketing the content they produce in order to help amplify it.

Joe talks about how he’s moved Thornley Fallis into an agency of makers with video, web design and creative people in-house. However, he’s noticed some clients aren’t including PR agencies when they’re looking to develop an integrated campaign and we need to change that.

Gini, who also transformed her firm into a maker agency, agrees and says there’s some confusion on the client side on what we, as new PR agencies, can do.

********************************************************************

We’d love to hear your thoughts.

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 D’Arbelles and Ashlea LeCompte.

Inside PR 3.48: Transparency and Disclosure in Media Relations

• • PR

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | RSS

[display_podcast]

On this week’s Inside PR podcast, Martin Waxman, Gini Dietrich and Joseph Thornley tackle an issue raised by Gini in a post on Spin Sucks: disclosure by PR agencies of business interest in media relations pitches. Gini kicks off the conversation by asking the question, “Should media disclose every time they work with a PR person in preparing a story?” Martin tells a story of a lesson earned through experience and Joe argues that the real issue isn’t the activity of PR agencies, but the notion that PR agencies are attempting to influence objective news gatekeepers. And we go from there.

Also this week, Martin also recommends that PR practitioners should take a close look at Google’s recent Hummingbird search algorithm changes.

Finally, in this episode, we talk about taking Inside PR on the road. We’ll be covering MeshMarketing which takes place in Toronto on November 7. If you are a marketer near or in Toronto, this is a conference well worth attending. You can find details on the schedule and registration here.

********************************************************************

We would love your thoughts.

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 3.27: The story on content

• • PR

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | RSS

[display_podcast]

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 :).

********************************************

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.

Enhanced by Zemanta

Inside PR video interviews with Shonali Burke and Shel Holtz

• • 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.

********************************************

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.

Enhanced by Zemanta

Inside PR 3.16: Measurement – Shonali Burke style

• • PR

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | RSS

[display_podcast]

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!

********************************************

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 3.13: The importance of participating in real life

• • PR

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | RSS

[display_podcast]

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.

PRSAIcon

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.

********************************************

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 3.11: We’re baaaack…

• • PR

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | RSS

[display_podcast]

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.

********************************************

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.