Go Inside PR – January podcasts

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The Inside PR podcast is entering its 13th calendar year. Thirteen years. That’s a lot of Internet time. And the podcast still is going strong.

This month, Gini Dietrich, Martin Waxman and I talked about a number of issues relating to social media, privacy and

Inside PR 533: The Best You Can Be

On Inside PR 533, we discussed

Inside PR 532: We’ve Got Resolutions

And for our first podcast of the year, Inside PR 532, we talked about our business and communications resolutions for 2019. Why not start off the year with great ambitions!

Linkworthy

If you’re looking for more information on the topics we discussed this month on Inside PR, check out the articles, videos and podcasts at the links below.

Inside PR 517: Did the NY Times decision on Sarah Jeong mark a turning point?

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Inside PR 517 has been posted – and it covers a lot of ground.

On Inside PR 517, we talk about the Sarah Jeong controversy that erupted last week. If you aren’t familiar with this, I have included links to key articles that will provide the background in the Linkworthy section below. Here’s a quick recap. Last week, the New York Times announced that Sarah Jeong would be leaving the Verge to join the NY Times as lead writer on technology. And then a Twitter storm erupted as attention was drawn to tweets authored by Jeong that were derogatory of white people. The Times quickly reaffirmed its decision, pointing to the context in which Jeong wrote those tweets and indicating that they would not be acceptable in future now that she has joined the Times. Coming in the wake of the James Gunn and Les Moonves controversies, could we indeed be seeing the a restoration of the balance between nuance and absolutism? As Martin asks, could we be back to a time in which we can admit to a mistake, own it, show contrition, and move on? We can only hope so.

Also, in this episode, we know that many listeners to this podcast speak about their area of practice to conferences and at professional development events. If you do this even once a year, you’ll be interested in a post that Gini Dietrich wrote on the SpinSucks blog, Six ways to generate leads from a speaking engagement. Martin and I both thought it offered practical advice that we would put to work – and we asked Gini to discuss it with us.

Finally, a couple #IPRMustKnows, things worth noting and acting upon:

  • WordPress is one more step closer to the full rollout of Project Gutenberg. This week, WordPress pushed out a maintenance update that included a prompt to all users to turn on the Gutenberg update. Gini did this for SpinSucks – and she raves about how great the new experience is. This may be the final release before WordPress 5.0 is pushed out to all users. And with WordPress 5.0, Gutenberg 5.0 will be turned on by default for all users. So, if you publish on WordPress and you haven’t turned on Gutenberg yet, now is your time to try it out.
  • Feedly is, in Joe’s opinion, the best newsreader available for people who want to curate their online information sources via RSS feeds. When Google closed down Google Reader, a substantial part of the Reader community migrated their reading lists to Feedly. That was a time of rocket ship growth for Feedly, which enabled users to access, read and curate their news sources on every device – desktop, tablet and mobile phone. Now the good folks at Feedly have initiated a major rewrite of the Feedly iOS app – and they have invited their community of users to test the app as it is being developed and provide their feedback. The Feedly team have set up a dedicated Slack Workspace for the beta phase, to announce the new features introduced or refined with each week’s release and asking for feedback on these features. And to enable participants in the beta to see that their input is being incorporated in the development team’s work, they’ve gone a step further, setting up a Trello workspace and posting links to it so that the participant community can see the state of work. The Beta program is just about to hit its midpoint. But new users still are joining. So, if you use Feedly and want to make it better, you too can still sign up to participate in the beta. Kudos to Feedly for building their app the right way, co-creating with their community will yield a much better product that meets both mainstream and specialized needs.

Linkworthy

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Inside PR in July

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The last half of July may have been the hottest on record. But that didn’t mean that we took a vacation from Inside PR. In fact, we posted several episodes. And you can catch up with them here:

All in all, a busy month. You can catch up with the podcast by clicking on any of the links above.


Inside PR 513: It’s about disclosure, stupid!

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On this week’s episode of the Inside PR podcast: The biggest change to WordPress in ten years; the Guardian decides good enough video really is good enough; and a teachable moment in marketing ethics. It’s about disclosure, stupid!

WordPress 5 with Gutenberg

WordPress users have something big to look forward to – the release of WordPress 5. WordPress published an updateforecasting that WordPress 5 will be released as early as August. Why is WordPress 5 such a big deal? Because it will incorporate the new Gutenberg editing system.

Gutenberg will be the first significant change in WordPress’ core editing dashboard in ten years. And when it is introduced, WordPress users will have, for the first time, a true WYSIWYG interface that will enable them to create, format and arrange their content as they create it, seeing the results as they make the changes. As long time WordPress users, this is something that we have been looking forward to. August can’t come soon enough.

Sometime good enough video is good enough

We know that video is the most engaging of social objects. But we also know that it takes a lot of work to produce highly polished “professional-looking” videos. Digiday reports that The Guardian has adjusted their approachto video on Instagram. They concluded that the uptake of their videos does not justify the high cost of production of highly polished videos. On the other hand, they also noticed that less polished videos were being viewed as often as higher quality, higher cost of production videos. So, from now on, the Guardian is producing less polished videos such as 12 to 15 screen “explainers.”

We think there is a lesson here for all of us – sometimes it makes sense to aim for “good enough” to achieve your objectives. If you can achieve your objective at lower cost, doesn’t it just make sense to do this?

If you fail to disclose, this could be you

A few weeks ago we talked about the less-than-transparent disclosure made by matte story distributors and publishers. This week, Buzzfeed threw daylight on another lapse in disclosure. They highlighted the behaviour of one marketing company that routinely places bylined articles in online news outlets such as Forbes and Entrepreneur without disclosing that references to their clients within the articles are in fact references to clients of the marketing firm.

Nobody is served well by this practice. Not the client. Not the publisher. And not the marketing firm. Just one more reminder to us all that trust is built over time, but can be lost with a single action. Let’s remember, when in doubt, disclose.

Linkworthy

This post originally appeared on the Inside PR Podcast blog.

Two Inside PR Podcasts this week

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Memorial Day Weekend is just around the corner. And we know that a lot of the listeners to the Inside PR podcast will be driving to weekend getaways tomorrow. So, we’re publishing this week’s episode before the weekend instead of after, so that our U.S. subscribers will have it to keep them occupied during their trips.

This week, we cover a lot of ground: Ev Williams reminds us about what the Internet can and should be. Worth considering. Society & Data issues a report on Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online. Worth Reading. Is Pinterest Shazam for Food? Worth sampling. Facebook struggles with community standard and keeps marching forward in video. Worth a time out? And MP3 is dead. Worth debunking.

If you’re not a subscriber yet, click over to the Inside PR podcast blog to download Inside PR 475.

Happy Memorial Day!

Find out who wants to join your Facebook group

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Better Tools for Facebook Group Administrators

Facebook Groups are used by many organizations and groups to bring their members and communities together in an accessible discussion forum. Now, Facebook has provided group administrators with the ability to set up a brief questionnaire that prospective new members would answer when requesting membership in the group. It’s not a big thing. But it will help administrators to understand who is joining the group and what has drawn them to it.

We’ve set up a questionnaire for new members of the Inside PR podcast Facebook Group. The questions are simple:

  • Where did you hear about the Inside PR podcast?
  • What topics would you like to hear about on the Inside PR podcast?
  • Which other podcasts do you find most useful to you in your work?

Easy to answer questions that will provide us with new insight into the evolving membership of our Facebook Group. A small innovation, but a valuable innovation.

Martin Waxman, Gini Dietrich and I discuss the new Facebook Group questions on the Inside PR podcast, episode 474.

Talking about PR issues on Inside PR 457

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IPR457 Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Twitter Moments for all of us. Large publishers’ growing dependency on Facebook. Thinking ahead about the implications of AI in our devices and apps. And the ethics of the close-hold embargo. Gini Dietrich, Martin Waxman and Joseph Thornley are back with another episode of the Inside PR podcast.  

#IPRMustKnows

Create your Own Twitter Moments

Twitter Moments, introduced for media and select users earlier this year, is now available for all users. This is a useful feature for anyone speaking at a conference or participating in an event or discussion that they want to curate and preserve. Bit by bit, Twitter is becoming even more useful.

Large publishers are becoming dependent on Facebook. But where is the revenue?

A report published by the International News Media Association and reported on by Nieman Lab indicates that 30% of visits to large publishers websites are referred from Facebook. That’s huge. But if publishers are becoming ever more dependent on Facebook’s network effect, and with Facebook favouring content published natively on it, the big question continues to be, is traffic paying off in revenue?

Getting out front on AI

The increasing introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) into apps, social networks and internet-connected devices raise a broad range of ethical, legal and policy issues. And where that happens, government is likely to act. So, it should come as no surprise that large businesses are banding together in a number of organizations to address these issues in order in advance of legislation and regulation. Of course, we can only hope that the voice of civil society will be heard alongside that of business.

A media relations issue to ponder: Close-hold embargoes

Charles Seife, writing in Scientific American, introduced us to a practice we had never encountered: A close-hold embargo. And it gives us the opportunity to ponder the line between transparency and manipulation and the ethical questions that public relations practitioners must confront when negotiating terms of access with news media.

This post was cross-posted from the Inside PR podcast blog.

MOZ’s Rand Fishkin reminds us that success and constant reinvention go hand in hand

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IPR456 Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Gini Dietrich, Martin Waxman and Joseph Thornley are back with another episode of the Inside PR podcast.  

#IPRMustKnows

Snapchat is a Snap

If you missed the news, Snapchat has rebranded and at the same time begun to move outside of its core business, including the promise of Snapchat video glasses. Snapchat may well pull off what Google Glass failed at.

Why Allo?

Google Plus redux? Do we need yet another duplicative app?

The sprit of selfless sharing

MOZ, the SEO app is a useful tool and source of expertise for many PR people who need to learn and apply pragmatic SEO to their programs. Recently, Ran Fishkin published a remarkable post in which he was both candid and insightful. And we contemplate his observation that “Inbound marketing never really became a thing…” A big deal if you are repositioning your company into the inbound marketing space. Something for PR people to think about as we reposition our businesses for the future. Not specifically about inbound marketing. But about any space we are moving toward. Will it still be there when we arrive?

Talking about the New York Times creating video for Facebook

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Inside PR 454 Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Gini Dietrich, Martin Waxman and Joseph Thornley are back with another episode of the Inside PR podcast.  

#IPRMustKnows

Martin Waxman’s Social Media Marketing for Small Business is on Lynda.com

Yes, this is a shameless plug. But since it’s Joe writing this, Martin doesn’t have to be embarrassed. In fact, I think Martin is as smart about social media as anyone I know. And now Martin is sharing this knowledge on Lynda.com. Martin tells us about his trip to California to record a video course, Social Media Marketing  for Small Business.

Buzzfeed News isn’t entertainment

Buzzfeed separated its Buzzfeed news operation from the Buzzfeed entertainment operation. Prelude to a possible sale of Fuzzfeed News. Buzzfeed News Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith says no.

WhatsApp shares user data with Facebook

As happens so often with privacy concerns, after an initial spate of bad press, public protestations about Facebook’s decision to share user data from WhatsApp with Facebook seems to have died down. Our concern with privacy is something that spikes occasionally. But then we put it out of mind as we enjoy the experience of social media.

Wired tells us about teens and social media

A few things in Wired’s profile of teens and social media caught Gini’s eye. There are a lot of do’s and don’t’s. It’s not about understanding young people. It’s about looking at the social mores being established by a cohort that doesn’t have the baggage of previously shaped expectations and behaviour, a cohort that can lead the way in assessing new channels and defining norms of behaviour on them. As Martin says, “One generation’s romantic is another generation’s lurker.” (Apologies to John Cusack.)

The NY Times on Facebook

Liz Spayd, The New York Times Public Editor, recently offered her take on the content that The Times has been creating for Facebook. In her analysis, Facebook Live: Too Much, Too Soon, she states

“…here’s the problem. After watching countless hours of live video in the past few weeks, I have hit upon many that are either plagued by technical malfunctions, feel contrived, drone on too long, ignore audience questions or are simply boring, by I imagine most anyone’s standards.

“Too many don’t live up to the journalistic quality one typically associates with The New York Times.”

This leads Martin, Gini and I into a discussion of the nature of content appropriate to social media. It’s not always going to stand up to The Times’ traditional standards. But it will be effective in its new place, for different reasons.

Also worth noting in this article is something I hadn’t seen before. The New York Times has a contract to produce video content expressly for Facebook.

“While the terms of the deal are secret, the transaction requires Facebook to give The Times a guaranteed sum (reported to be $3 million a year) in return for a prescribed amount of video (so far it’s averaging upward of four a day). Neither Times officials nor Facebook would discuss the deal, citing confidentiality. Several other media companies, including BuzzFeed, Huffington Post and Mashable, have also signed on. Their job: to stock Facebook’s pond with high-quality video so it can compete in the rapidly growing market for live-stream video.”

The Times as content creator for Facebook. That’s something different from The Times posting its stories on Facebook. Different even from The Times posting its stories natively on Facebook. It is instead The Times creating content to meet Facebook’s needs. That is different – and worth watching.