Inside PR 436: Meerkat pivots, Facebook Reactions, Snapchat videos

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Gini Dietrich, Martin Waxman and I are back together again for  Inside PR 436 – the first episode in over a month in which all three of us are together.

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In this episode’s #IPRMust Know segment, we talk about Meerkat’s pivot, Facebook Reactions and Snapchat’s big video view numbers.

Meerkat is moving away from live streaming and attempting to pivot to become some type of video social network. Not surprising, given the tight integration of Periscope and Twitter and the introduction of Facebook live videos. It would be tough to see how Meerkat could stand out with the two main realtime social networks offering their own live streaming platforms.

Facebook Reactions have been with us for several weeks now. Chris Penn’s early look at the impact of Facebook Reactions suggested that “haven’t statistically changed engagement yet. If you publish unengaging content, Reactions won’t help you. If you already have a highly-engaged audience, you will likely continue to do so – Reactions don’t appear to make it better or worse.”  We offer our own early reactions to Reactions.

If you didn’t have enough video in your life, take a look at Snapchat. Snapchat’s CEO Evan Spiegel says that Snapchat users are watching more than 8 billion videos per day. There’s clearly an audience for video. So, if you produce video as part of your initiatives, it’s worth checking out what works well on Snapchat.

Fake accounts. Could this happen to you?

We close out this episode with a discussion of the communications agency executive who faked over $250 million in contracts go gain advancement at this advertising agency. Sad but true.

And a big thanks to Suzy Chisholm. Suzy, who heard me state a few episodes back that I preferred single purpose apps over those that take a “Swiss Army Knife” approach. Suzy, who lives in Switzerland, sent us three Swiss Army Knives, branded with the Philips logo (where Suzy works) and a very nice note. Thank you Suzy. You brought smiles to our faces and reminded us that there are times when you want to reach for that one thing that does it all. 🙂

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This post is first appeared on the Inside PR Podcast blog.

Inside PR 414: Humans, algorithmic content creation and #IPRMustKnows

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Episode 414 of the Inside PR is available for download.

Inside PR 414 [ 20:48 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

On this week’s episode, Martin Waxman, Gini Dietrich and I give you three #IPRMustKnows:

  1. Meerkat introduces and embeddable player. Now you can put your streaming media on your own site.
  2. Yeplive joins the streaming video field. And it lets you shoot your video in landscape mode, unlike Meerkat and Persicope which serve up your videos in portrait mode. You can get the Yep Live app in the iOS and Play stores.
  3. Google “began remotely installing audio-snooping code that was capable of listening to users.” The code supports Google’s hotword feature that enables voice commands. This is the kind of feature you need to be aware of. Remember what you enable on your device because always-on monitoring has become a “feature” of our lives.

In our main discussion this week, we turn our attention to the increasing role of algorithms and computer code not only to shape the distribution of news, but also to create content. Do you know when your news is generated by a person or generated by an algorithm? This is the type of development that strongly divides people. And it is a discussion that we’ll surely be having much more in the future.

We’d love to hear what you think.

Send us an email or an audio comment to [email protected], join the FIR Google+ Community, 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.

(This article is cross-posted from the Inside PR podcast blog.)