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.
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.
Do you become more verbose when your thinking isn’t clear? I know I do. The less certain I am about what I want to say, the more words I will use. In effect, I think out loud.
This is not something I’m proud of. I know it makes others cringe and run as fast as they can out of my hearing. And I try to edit myself. I tell myself, “Silence is my friend.”
Do you want an example of what I mean? Then listen to this week’s Inside PR. Not my best episode. Clearly, Gini Dietrich and Martin Waxman are good people. Otherwise, I’m sure they would have said, “Joe, shut the heck up.”
How about you? Do you ever feel that you share this problem? Thinking out loud, but not necessarily getting to the point?
How many followers on social media are enough? Do you watch your numbers and constantly search for new ways to gain a new friend or an extra follower?
Do you see a herd or a community of interest?
In this week’s Inside PR, Gini Dietrich expresses her annoyance at discovering that some people seem to be using the #FF (Follow Friday) hashtag primarily as a means to get the attention of others on Twitter who have high follower counts. Ginny observed that some people she is following seem to point only to others who already have high follower counts. Ginny wonders whether those recommendations are sincere endorsements of content or instead, attempts to get those high follower people to reply, putting the original person’s ID in their Twitter stream and attracting more interest to themselves. Thinly veiled spam? An extension of the old-style interruption broadcast advertising psychology?
I monitor the number of followers, subscribers, mentions and comments on my blog and other social media as part of my calculation of return on investment. Given that my greatest cost of creating and sharing content is my time (and I always have other things that I could be doing with my time), I make a calculation of whether I am talking to myself or whether I am part of a community that shares my interests and is actively engaged with me. While I don’t put a dollar amount on that calculation, I do make a calculation of my relative return on the investment of my time.
So, having admitted that I do track my numbers, why don’t I spend more time trying to dramatically increase my numbers of followers? The answer is simple: I am interested in engagement with the community that cares about my content, not in raw reach. What counts for me is a genuine connection with a community of interest, not simply growing the size of my audience.
How does that compare with your approach to social media?
Do you focus on finding and engaging with a clearly defined community of interest that corresponds with your personal interests or the interest of your organization? Or do you pursue ever larger numbers of subscribers, followers and friends?
I’m a big fan of podcasts. I listen to them in the car, at home, while I’m on the treadmill and on the subway. Thanks to podcasting, I can listen to my favorite programs when and where it’s convenient for me. But what’ s even better about podcasts is that I can find content that focuses on my interests. And my interests are much narrower than the general public’ s interests. This isn’t broadcasting. It’s content for me and my community.
Each week, Martin Waxman, Gini Dietrich and I record the Inside PR podcast. We talk about things that interest us as communications professionals who are also exploring the changes that social software and social networking have made possible in the ways that people find one another, form relationships and interact. We try to talk about what’ s really going on, not just what happened. So we look for the truths and trends that underlie the communications and technology developments of the week.
It’ s fun for us to share our thoughts. But it’ s even better when you tell us what you think. So, please do give us your ideas for what we should talk about on inside PR. You can reach us on our Inside PR podcast Facebook Group, by leaving a comment on the Inside PR blog, or by tweeting to @inside_PR.
Don’ t be a stranger. Don’ t be shy. Let us know what matters to you and what you would like Inside PR to talk about.
And because seeing is better than reading, here’s my video invitation to participate in setting the agenda for Inside PR.
This week in Inside PR, Martin Waxman and I talk about the changing media landscape. This follows on recent changes to both the digital and traditional paper versions of the New York Times, Globe and Mail and Toronto Star.
We also have an audio comment on the power of Twitter to connect communities of interest from Jody Koehler, founder of Coopr PR in the Netherlands.
Also, if you haven’t seen it yet, check out the video of Jeff Jarvis‘ presentation in Frankfurt about creating publics. There’s a lot to think about in what Jeff is suggesting.
You can listen to the complete podcast by clicking on the player here.
Finally, please remember that we produce this podcast as a way of connecting with out community of interest. You can reach us many ways – through a comment on this post or on the Inside PR blog, by leaving a video comment on our new Inside PR Podcast Facebook Group or by tweeting to @Inside_PR. We’d love to hear from you.
When I started the ProPR blog in 2005, the social media conversation was focused on blog posts, links, trackbacks and comments on those blogs.
But that changed with the introduction of Twitter and Facebook. Twitter gave us drop-dead simple posting and conversation. Facebook is hard-wired to connect with friends and signal affinity. Simple publishing platforms that everyone could use. And with simplicity came numbers. And with numbers came conversation.
As people flocked to these new publishing platforms, the conversation followed them. And I noticed a decreased in comments on ProPR.ca. But that didn’t mean that I noticed a decrease in the conversations I was involved in. In fact, I continued to find new people I’d follow and engage in conversation with them. But that now happened primarily on Twitter.
Over time, Twitter became my preferred social space. It seemed to be THE place where I found people sharing interesting links to long form content – a discovery engine driven by the people with whom I share interests. I began to follow people and others who shared my interests followed me. And as we did this, we shared content and replied to one another’s posts. All in 140 characters or less. On any device – desktop, laptop, tablet or mobile.
So, I followed my community from blogging to Twitter. And I’ve learned a lot from the conversation.
But one place I did not follow the conversation to is Facebook. I was an early adopter of Facebook and approached it as a place to connect with family and close friends. It was the place that I’d publish things that I only wanted to share with a small, close group of friends. And generally speaking, the content I found on Facebook reflected that – people sharing small gestures and information of personal import. What I rarely found on Facebook was the kind of thoughtful, deep dive content into specific topics. For that I still need to turn to blogs. Basically, people who invest a lot of effort into thinking through issues and writing about them prefer to post to places that they own and control, not to a platform that has an evolving business model and shifting policies regarding privacy, advertisement and the organization of content.
But … it’s foolish to ignore any place where more than 500 million people gather. And the revision of the Groups feature on Facebook has caused me to take another look at how I might make better use of Facebook.
As I said, Facebook is hard wired for connecting with friends and causes and signalling affinity for them. And there is a huge amount of conversation on Facebook.
So, I’m going to see whether Facebook Groups will provide a better vehicle for conversations around two communities that I belong to. I’ve set up a Inside PR Podcast Facebook Group and a Third Tuesday Facebook Group. For the next two months, I’ll make an effort to cross post information to these two groups and to participate in any conversations that develop there. At the end of those two months I’ll report back on what has happened and how they each compare to the other places that I use – ProPR.ca, the Inside PR podcast site, the Third Tuesday Meetup sites, my @thornley Twitter feed and the @Inside PR Twitter feed.
Already, I’ve realized one immediate benefit of Facebook. It makes creating and posting video comments dumb simple. I’ve posted an introductory video on the Inside PR Podcast group.
It’s not great quality. I created it on the spur of the moment using my iPod Touch. And that’s the first benefit of the new Facebook Group feature I’ve discovered. It makes posting and responding to video comments as easy as writing a test comment.
I’ll be interested to see whether the conversation flourishes in these places. I hope you’ll join me there.
The latest episode of Inside PR is online. This week, Martin Waxman, Gini Dietrich and I talk about social media meetups that we attend and how pick which events we will participate in.
You can listen to the complete episode here.
0:30 Martin opens the show.
1:37 Joe shares the first listener comment, from Clint Stiles, about Inside PR #30.
3:37 Longtime listener, Chartwell 65, offers some suggestions to improve the show.
8:55 Joe talks a bit about Third Tuesday and how it started up.
10:20 Joe kicks off the next topic and asks Martin and Gini how they decided which events to attend and why?
14:37 Martin tells us about his first time attending PodCamp Toronto.
15:35 Joe shares what he looks for in a conference.
19:46 Gini encourages everyone to check out Empire Avenue.
20:13 Martin closes the show.
Thanks are due to Inside PR producer Yasmine Kashefi for creating these shownotes.
Oops. We didn’t press the “publish” button on Inside PR 2.14 and then we didn’t discover it until the weekend when everyone was offline.
But, it’s published now. You can listen to it here.
As always, we’d welcome your comments and we’ll respond to them in the next episode.
In this week’s episode of Inside PR, Gini Dietrich and I talk about summertime and the PR business. Is it cyclical. Does it have to slow down. What can we do to make best use of the slower summer days? Maybe close the office early every Friday?
Is summer slower at your company? What do you do to keep busy? To keep staff morale up? We’d love to hear from you. Leave a comment below and we’ll use it in next week’s show.
We also talk about the acquisition of social media metrics company Sysomos by Marketwire, the latest in a series of social media metrics industry consolidations. I regularly use Radian6 and PostRank and think that social media metrics are a core tool for the new PR. Hopefully, consolidation will not stifle innovation in this area.
I also get a chance to make the point that organizations attempting to move opinion online should be transparent and disclose their interests from the outset. The recent controversy over the failure of the groups behind the Balanced Copyright Website to declare themselves underlines that, sooner or later, you’ll be forced to disclose who is behind online campaigns.
And, how could we close out the show without a quick pass at Prince’s statement that the Internet is over. Heck, after 30 years in the music industry, Prince still has us talking about him. So, I’m game to listen to what he has to say.
You can listent to all of our Inside PR musings here:
Inside PR Shownotes
0:28 Joe opens the show.
1:50 Joe talks about the summer slowdown.
6:12 Joe asks Inside PR listeners if summers are slower at their workplace and what they do to manage the lighter workload while keeping morale high.
7:10 Joe talks about the show’s first topic: Sysomos’ recent acquisition by Marketwire. He mentions a recent post by Dave Fleet about other social media monitoring tool acquisitions over the past year.
8:30 Gini talks about the various social media monitoring tools her business uses.
10:10 Joe shares his favourite social media monitoring tools.
17:12 Gini talks about Prince’s outrageous comment “The internet is over”.
21:45 Joe wraps up the show.
Our theme music was created by Damon de Szegheo; Roger Dey is our announcer.
This week’s episode was produced by Yasmine Kashefi.
In the next few days, both Canada and the United States will be celebrating our National Holidays, on July 1 and July 4 respectively. And these holidays fall only a week after the G20 summit of world leaders held this past weekend in Toronto.
So, it’s not surprising that Martin Waxman, Gini Dietrich and I found ourselves focusing in this week’s Inside PR on earth-moving news (yes, we had an earthquake in Canada too!), including the G20 Summit and the view that social media, especially Twitter provided of this event.
In a nutshell, the social media coverage was visceral, diverse and community-oriented. Traditional news media, on the other hand, while capturing pictures of the street level action, had a near monopoly on coverage of what went on inside the secure perimeter of the actual G20 Summit.
Does this highlight a limitation of social media? People can’t cover what they can’t get access to?
Listen to the complete Inside PR Podcast
Thanks to @michael_kerr @hummingbird604 @SeanMoffitt @digitaljoy @dereklothian for suggesting the topics for this week’s podcast.
Shownotes prepared by Inside PR Producer Yasmine Kashefi
0:27 Martin opens the show.
2:17 Martin tells us how the G20 impacted his move to the new energi PR offices.
3:46 Joe paints a picture of what the G20 was like over the past weekend in Toronto and introduces this week’s first topic: the G20 and social media.
6:36 Joe points out the limitations of social media during the G20.
12:51 Joe wonders why the G20 organizers failed to incorporate elements of social media to inform the public during the talks.
14:53 Martin introduces the second topic: how social media is breaking “news” before traditional media.
18:18 Gini explains how it is difficult to determine what is and isn’t credible on Twitter.
21:18 Martin closes the show.
