Category Archives: Inside PR

August couldn’t last forever (too bad) and neither could our vacation from the Inside PR podcast. So, as September ushers in cooler weather, Martin Waxman, Gini Dietrich and I are back in front of our microphones to record this week’s Inside PR.

Inside PR 2.67 [ 17:07 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Be a mensch

We start off with a discussion of corporate social responsibility – an issue Liza Butcher raised in a comment last week. Gini talks about the preference people have to work with a company that gives back. I cite Guy Kawasaki’s suggestion in his new book, Enchantment, that you “should be a mensch.” Among other things, this means that you should “help someone who can be of absolutely no use to you.” Martin underlines this point with an example of a company that risked appearing self serving and self congratulatory in acting upon their social responsibility.

We the People

We also talk about the We the People site that is being launched by the White House. I compare it to the British Prime Minister’s Number10 Website, which also has a petition function as well as links to policy consultations. I’m skeptical of the value of pure crowdsourcing for policy development. I believe that it can lead to unfocused conversations. The best results are achieve, I think, when the policy makers are prepared to guide the conversation, being up front and honest about parameters, practical limits and secondary objectives. In other words, I think that the best public policy emerges when policy makers channel pure crowd sourcing into “purposeful discussion” through their active and open participation in the conversation.

Gini argues that the site falls short of its potential by making the culmination of the process a response from policy makers in the White House. Martin wonders about the requirement for 5,000 expressions of support as the threshold at which petitions will receive a reply. Is it an arbitrary number? Or is there some rationale for this?

Darwin for measurement

Finally, we talk about the recent news that monitoring service VMS shut its doors recently. Katie Paine published a thoughtful post on why the service failed. One of her arguments that rang true to me is that some longstanding suppliers are focused on giving their customers what they feel comfortable with. Newer entrants like Radian6 and Sysomos are innovating to provide the marketplace with new insights. Services that don’t match them will fall by the wayside.

So, that’s our first post-summer IPR. Please give it a listen and let us know what you think.

Inside PR 2.45 [ 14:45 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Martin Waxman, Gini Dietrich and I are all here for this week’s Inside PR. We talk about a couple things this week – community-driven events and online sharing.

Are unconferences and community-driven events dying?

We look back one more time at our great experience at this year’s highly successful Podcamp Toronto. It takes a huge amount of effort to organize this type of event. And as professionally organized events have moved into the social media space, have they lessened our appetite and the pool of volunteers willing to organize unconferences? Do the professionally organized conferences cause us to have expectations of a conference that a community-based, volunteer driven conference can’t meet?

What’s happening in your community. Are there still vibrant unconferences or other community-driven events where you live? Are they becoming more frequent and more successful? Or rarer? Less well attended? We’d love to hear from you about this.

Sharing is Forever

We also talk about online sharing – or over-sharing. Martin starts the conversation by pointing to two sites that let you share your clickstream. Wow!

Would you want to share with others all the sites that you visit? Do you use the Web for work-related research? Is this an idea for a business that simply won’t work – at least if people appreciate the value of making conscious decisions about what we share.

Often, a choice to share is forgotten or poorly understood. We’ve already seen how Facebook’s frequent changes of their terms of service leads to people sharing information they hadn’t consciously realized they were sharing. Or think of Tumblr. How many people shared information on Tumblr, became bored with the platform and forgot that it is still spewing information about them. As Gini says, The Web doesn’t have a “Forget” button. Sharing is forever.

It’s the week after the snowstorm – and Inside PR is digging out from under the snowbanks – or at least Gini Dietrich is.

Inside PR 2.40 [ 15:40 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Lots to talk about this week

Last week, I chaired a conference on Social Media for Government, organized by the Advanced Learning Institute. This conference was bookended by a pair of extraordinary presentations by Linda Williamson and Elena Yunusov from the Office of the Ombudsman of Ontario andScott Mills from Toronto Police Services that dealt with the demonstrations and conduct of the police during last summer’s G20 Summit in Toronto. Both the Ombudsman and Toronto Police Services use social media – and both were remarkably candid about their experience and the lessons they learned. All in all, two extraordinary presentations.

Gini takes us through the Kenneth Cole #Cairo fiasco on Twitter. Gini reminds us that companies trying to raise their profile through stunts should remember that all PR is not good PR. Martin draws on his background in comedy to point out that gallows humour is a tough thing to pull off. I suggest that hashtag for Kenneth Cole’s tweeting should have been #Crass.

And to close out the show, Martin talks about Twitter’s appearance in a recent episode of Gray’s Anatomy. Martin, is Gray’s Anatomy still on the air?

As always, thanks to Yasmine Kashefi for producing Inside PR.

Join us at Podcamp Toronto

We’ve scheduled a live Inside PR recording on February 26 at Podcamp Toronto. If you’re planning to attend Podcamp, please join us to take part in the live recording.

Let us know what you think

Let us know what you think. Leave a comment below or send an email or an audio comment to insideprcomments@gmail.com, join the Inside PR Facebook group, or message us @inside_pr on Twitter. Or connect withMartin Waxman, Joe Thornley, and Gini Dietrich on Twitter.

This week on Inside PR, Martin Waxman, Gini Dietrich and I discuss viral videos and Quora, the question and answer website. The viral video discussion begins at minute 2:55 and the Quora discussion at minute 11:34.

I hope you enjoy this episode.

Inside PR 2.36 [ 18:29 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

And please join the conversation with us. Leave a comment on this post. Even better, send an audio comment to insideprcomments@gmail.com. We’d love to include your audio clip in the next podcast.

Big thanks to our producer, Yasmine Kashefi.