Inside PR 409: Living in a world of micro-moments and video to go

• • Inside PR, PR

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Martin here and excuse me while I check my phone. I’m having a micro-moment. But more on that in a few, er-moments.

This week it’s Joe and me; Gini’s on the road. And because of our schedules recently, you’ve probably noticed May has been a quieter IPR month. But we’re all back in June.

In today’s episode, we have a couple of topics to discuss – both revolving around Google.

The first is micro-moments, or what Google describes as ‘I want to know, I want to go, I want to buy moments’. I call them the frequent times we turn to our smartphones during the day – often when we’re in the middle of something else – to find out some info, daydream, or take a mini-break from what we’re doing.

These mobile interactions are having a profound impact on the way we discover and consume information and what we do with our idle time.

Many of our micro-moments revolve around watching videos. And according to Google, people who view videos on their phones are 1.4 times as likely to watch ads as those on desktops or TVs and are more likely to talk about the ads they saw. Are the dollar signs lighting up?

The challenge for brands is to learn how to produce video that works for the small-screen. In other words, create for the medium – panorama shots may be amazing in a movie theatre, but don’t work so well on a five inch screen. Think about your audience and what they’re looking for and how you can reach them with the kind of video they want to see at the just the right point in time. Here’s a post from Joe with his thoughts on the importance of creating videos for mobile devices.

What do you think about micro-moments, how they’re affecting our purchase intent and attention spans? And when you’re in the middle of one of these moments, what kinds of video content makes you stop, watch and share?

We’d love to hear from you.

And thanks to Breyanna Tripp from Kent State and Charles Cawte for their comments.

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 Ashlea McGrath.

 

 

Inside PR 407: PR generalists versus specialists

• • PR

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Martin here and it’s a jam-packed episode this week. But first a milestone: it’s been nine years since Terry Fallis and David Jones started Inside PR and we want to give Terry and Dave a big congratulations and bigger thank you! And thanks to all of you for sticking with us. If you’re interested, head to the archives and listen to IPR #1.

Back to 2015…On today’s show, we talk about three things:

1. When to hire a PR firm – and when you should wait
Gini wrote a post about a startup client whose product wasn’t ready when they hired her firm, so any traffic the Arment Dietrich team drove to the site led to customer frustration since the business wasn’t ready for…um business. Moral: sometimes entrepreneurs need to put the brakes on their PR efforts until they have something to show, solid goals and can afford it.

2. PR generalist or specialist – where is the industry heading?
According to the Holmes Report Card, in recent years PR agencies have been hiring specialists over generalists, similar to the way things operate in the ad and marketing industries. However, data now shows the generalist may still have a role, especially as it pertains to developing strategy. Thanks to Shel Holtz for suggesting this idea.

3. LinkedIn buys Lynda.com – are jobs posting now going to be linked to skills training?
LinkedIn’s become a publisher, job source, networking space and virtual rolodex and now it’s moving into training with its $1.5 billion purchase of training site, Lynda.com. See a job you want but lack some of the skills. LI may have a training program for you. Thanks to Alison Garwood-Jones for suggesting this topic.

What do you think?

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 Ashlea McGrath.

Inside PR 404: Media just keeps on changing…

• • 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.

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 Ashlea McGrath.

Inside PR 401: On citizen journalism and PR

• • 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?

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.

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 393: Our naughty or nice PR list…

• • PR

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Martin here. This week, it’s Gini and me. Joe’s on the road traveling home.

And in the spirit of the season we thought we’d share our PR naughty or nice list for 2014.

First up: naughty.

And the lump of coal goes to…Edelman.

Really? Why?

Well, a Canadian company, TransCanada, hired the venerable agency to build support for a pipeline that will transport oil from Western Canada to refineries in the east. But when the agency recommended secretly using third-parties to attack the pipeline’s opponents and a document with the strategy was leaked to Greenpeace, TransCanada fired Edelman over ethical concerns.

Does this sort of program sound like a whisper campaign to you? It does to us.

Gini has written extensively about why whisper campaigns and other unethical tactics hurt PR. She likens the process to that of broken telephone, where what the last person hears is often very different from what was said at the beginning. Gini says that rather than sneaking through the back door, the profession should be open and honest. What do you think?

Now for our nice list.

Gini posed a question on Facebook asking people to nominate their suggestions the PR win of the year. She got a lot of replies including the Ice Bucket Challenge, Miley Cyrus, Taylor Swift (Gini’s selection on SpinSucks) and WestJet.

We chose WestJet for an imaginative follow up on its successful Christmas Miracle video. Once again, the company borrowed elements of classic holiday movies and showed, in an emotional way, how much they care about their customers and community.

Here’s the 2014 WestJet video.

And here’s the one from 2013.

Which PR programs would you put on the naughty list? And which ones would you qualify as nice? We’d love to hear what you think.

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.

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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: Special show on SXSW V2V with Christine Auten

• • PR

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Martin here.

And today we have a special episode where I talk to Christine Auten, producer of SXSW V2V, the younger, brasher sister festival of SXSWi. I say that because V2V is held amid the glitz and glamor of Las Vegas and focuses on startups and entrepreneurs.

One of the key differences between this year and last is that each day starts and ends with everyone together.

Mornings are for keynotes. On Monday, Ari Horie, the dynamic founder and CEO of Women’s Startup Lab talks about opportunities for women entrepreneurs. On Tuesday, John Maeda speaks about creativity and bringing Design to De$ign. Wednesday has Brian Solis interviewing Shinola president Jacques Panis on the ‘Built in Detroit’ movement and how that applies to startups.

After that come a series of breakouts, panels, inspiring 20/20 vision talks, workshops and mentor sessions. And then back for the final session of the day followed by the social program. This year, there’s going to be a film screening, music performance and for the final party, a bowling tournament – bring your socks.

The content focuses on the intersection of startups and showbiz – and there’s a special room for convergence sessions including What Rockers Can Teach Startups – that is, what lessons startups can take away from the passion-driven world of musicians and artists.

What differentiates SXSWV2V from SXSW?
Christine says the biggest thing is the size. It’s an intimate event all in one space where you can meet and chat with everyone.  And when you leave, it feels like the people you met are not just connections, they’re more like a family.

What’s Christine expecting in 2014?
“We don’t know what the show’s going to be like till we get there,” she says. “The community makes up so much of the experience.”

Interested in more info? Here’s the schedule. Or follow the hashtag #sxswv2v.

And here’s a blog post on my Supercharged Storytelling for Startups session.

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We’d love to hear your thoughts.

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 Ashlea LeCompte.

Inside PR is part of the FIR Podcast Network.

IPR special edition: Rob Biesenbach on telling stories

• • PR

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Martin here. I’m getting ready to head off to PRSA Counselors Academy’s spring conference and thought I’d catch up with one of the presenters, Rob Biesenbach. Rob is a communications expert, speaker, writer and actor who is ‘fighting to end dull ordinary communications in our time’.  (But he doesn’t have a cape.)

At Counselors, Rob’s going to be talking about how to Unleash the Power of Storytelling to build trust and win business.

He says most people play fast and loose with the definition of story and don’t understand its distinct structure: a character, in pursuit of a goal, in the face of some sort of obstacle.

Stories aren’t a quote from Winston Churchill or a customer testimonial.

Rob likens our job as communicators with acting: both require you to connect with your audience, tell a story well and express yourself. Too many businesses compare themselves to other businesses – when they should be looking to and learning from show business, where the most powerful stories in our culture can be found.

Rob is also doing an Ingnite style presentation based on his new book, 11 Deadly Presentation Sins.

He talks about the three he thinks are the worst:

  • Failure to connect with an audience
  • Failure to focus
  • Doing a data dump rather than a story that’s filled with emotion.

And when it comes to PowerPoint, he cautions us that when you see ‘insert text here’ on a slide, it’s a suggestion, not a command.

Want to hear more? You can catch Rob at Counselors Academy or check out his website.

And if you’re interested in Counselors Academy and the other presenters, you can follow the hashtag on Twitter #CAPRSA.

Gini and Joe will be back next episode.

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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 Ashlea LeCompte.

Inside PR 364: Our PR loves

• • PR

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Martin here.

Because we recorded this episode on Valentine’s Day, we decided to talk about our PR loves – as in the tools that help us do our jobs better – not the people. The idea came from a Spin Sucks post by Gini and her team.

Martin’s loves:

  • Twitter for connecting, sharing/curating, sending quick messages and generally finding out what’s trending.
  • Evernote – the place where I keep all my notes, random thoughts, blog posts, ideas and to do lists. They’re organized, searchable and accessible on whatever device I happen to be on.

Joe’s loves (two pairs):

  • Feedly for news, tagging and follow-up and Diigo to store, annotate and keep track of posts he wants to reference later. Joe says that as communications professionals, we need to have the facts at hands when writing and both these platforms help with that.
  • Buffer and Hootsuite to schedule and share stories easily.

Gini’s loves:

  • Talkwalker, a new app that works like Google alerts. Gini likes it even more since its Hootsuite integration, which lets you schedule or tweet out alerts.
  • Scrivener the app Gini uses for writing books and other long-form content. Not only does it help keep you organized, it develops your table of contents and index, and it’s searchable so you can easily find various parts of a manuscript during your writing.

What are the tools you love that make your day easier?

We end the show with a question from Daniel Francavilla, a student of mine who owns his own design business. Daniel wondered about the importance of design and visual identity in communications.

Joe says (and we all agree) that it’s often the differentiator. We’ve gone from a world where the big choice used to be selecting a template in Word to one where design is integral to our work and the people who want to be competitive are those who design for a multimedia experience.

Thanks Daniel.

One quick reminder: For anyone in Toronto and Ottawa – the next Third Tuesday features data analyst Jim Sterne on the human side of analytics – #3TYYZ February 26 in Toronto and #3TYOW February 27 in Ottawa. Hope to see you there. And here’s Jim Sterne’s song parody, Modern Data Analyst.

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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 3.59: Trends and fears for 2014

• • PR

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Martin here…

2013 is drawing to a close. And we know how busy people are with Christmas shopping, holiday parties and other seasonal celebrations. So we thought we’d keep it short and sweet and focus on one trend and one fear we have for 2014.

But first, I talk about PR Baton, a new initiative created by Dana Hughens, where PR people take part in a virtual relay on Instagram to visually showcase a day in the life of an industry pro. I was carrying the baton the day we recorded; here’s the photo I did to commemorate this episode.

Check out the PR Baton on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.

Now onto the show.

Gini’s Trend:
Agencies need to evolve or they will disappear. She references a study saying CMOs are unhappy with the roles ad and PR folks play in driving results for their organization because most agencies haven’t integrated digital with traditional and aren’t accountable for results.

Gini’s Fear:
Not being able to integrate the four media types – paid, earned, shared and owned – in a strategic way. PR especially needs to focus on learning about paid.

Joe’s Trend:
It’s going to be a year of big getting bigger; not necessarily for everyone’s betterment, but because there’s so much momentum in that direction. However, with that he sees an opportunity for independents who put their focus on innovation.

Joe’s Fear:
PR is going to become even more commoditized than it already is.

Martin’s Trend:
I harken back to 1999 and invoke another C word (and not content, communications or connection) – convergence. Next year is going to require a convergence of transmedia storytelling skills and agencies will have to take risks to find and  build the right team.

Martin’s Fear:
I reference a recent blog post that says while social media is fast, relationships and trust still take time. That’s something I hope we don’t forget.

What trends and fears to you have for 2014? We’d love to hear from you.

Happy holidays!

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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.

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 part of the FIR Podcast Network.

Inside PR is produced by Kristine D’Arbelles and Ashlea LeCompte.

Inside PR 3.55: Agency or in-house? That is our question.

• • Inside PR, PR

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[display_podcast]

Here we are with our second show on the FIR podcast network.

And this week, we’re not talking about Toronto Mayor Ford’s – er…rather unique – approach to communications. That will come soon.

Gini introduces our topic, which she found via the Vocus content suite she’s testing out; a story about how Visa fired its PR agencies and took the work in house.

Is this a trend?
Gini hopes this won’t continue, but thinks there’s a chance it might. So she’s looking for more signs and wonders if other larger corporations will follow suit or not.

Joe references Dell’s experiment with a purpose-built agency that they started and then abandoned. He doesn’t believe the move to in-house is going to be a trend because agencies bring a broad outside approach, ideas and creativity that is a benefit for clients.

Martin agrees and says the external viewpoint offers a fresh perspective you may not have considered and gives the example that often times what seems like big news to a client may not be to the world and it’s an agency’s job to offer solid counsel and say the things you may not want to hear.

Agencies can also provide insights and analytics that help clients understand whether or not a campaign is a success and why.

We also talk about Twitter’s new Custom Timelines, content streams where you can follow a topic or hashtag and embed the feed on your website or blog. It’s something you could do on Hootsuite within the platform, but now on Twitter, it’s a publicly sharable feed.

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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 part of the FIR Podcast Network.

Inside PR is produced by Kristine D’Arbelles and Ashlea LeCompte.