Digital Download with Paul Sutton

The public relations industry has rebounded from the COVID-19 pandemic far quicker and stronger than many predicted it would. It is arguably in better shape now than it was two years ago. But the impact of the pandemic on the business world means that challenges have been created that the industry must address during 2022.

The special guest in this episode of the Digital Download podcast is Koray Camgoz, Director of Communications at the PRCA. As a result of research conducted by the PRCA, together with anecdotal evidence from its members, Koray discusses three key challenges that all communications practitioners must face head on as we head into the new year.

This episode of the podcast is supported by Podchaser Pro, making podcast discovery and analysis a breeze. Podchaser Pro builds on Podchaser’s best-in-class data set to provide access to reach, contacts, demographics and more, and bring radical efficiency to the process of discovering, qualifying, and contacting podcasts.

Subscribe to the podcast to receive new episodes automatically to your mobile or email. And if you enjoyed today’s show, please email it to a friend and/or share it on your favourite social media channels. I’d love to hear from you with any comments or thoughts. I read and reply to every single email, tweet or message. And finally, it would also be very awesome and hugely appreciated if you’d be able to take a moment to leave an honest review and rating for the podcast on iTunes or Podchaser, as this helps others discover Digital Download.

COP26 has thrust climate change and sustainability into the boardrooms of every single marginally responsible company around the world. While Governments have a critical role to play, the spotlight is increasingly on business to step up to the plate.

The job of the communications sector is going to come under increasing scrutiny over the next 12 months, with organisations regularly fighting accusations of greenwashing for under-researched environmental claims. And with strong ESG principles generating greater returns for investors, the pressure really is starting to ramp up.

The special guest in this episode of the Digital Download podcast is Pete Martin, director of content marketing agency, Always Be Content. We discuss COP26 and the demands on and responsibilities of business leaders as a result, and look at how communicators can tackle the sustainability issue and avoid being accused of greenwashing.

This episode of the podcast is supported by Podchaser Pro, making podcast discovery and analysis a breeze. Podchaser Pro builds on Podchaser’s best-in-class data set to provide access to reach, contacts, demographics and more, and bring radical efficiency to the process of discovering, qualifying, and contacting podcasts.

Subscribe to the podcast to receive new episodes automatically to your mobile or email. And if you enjoyed today’s show, please email it to a friend and/or share it on your favourite social media channels. I’d love to hear from you with any comments or thoughts. I read and reply to every single email, tweet or message. And finally, it would also be very awesome and hugely appreciated if you’d be able to take a moment to leave an honest review and rating for the podcast on iTunes or Podchaser, as this helps others discover Digital Download.

Personal branding is a big thing in 2021, with much written on the significant business value of having a strong online presence and reputation. But among all the hype, no-one ever talks about the drawbacks of becoming ‘known’. 

In this episode of the Digital Download podcast I talk to Jeri Williams, who runs Smooth Accounting. Since establishing a profile on LinkedIn in 2018, Jeri has grown a huge following of 48,000 people. But while that has brought with it many opportunities and lots of leads and business, it has also attracted the less savoury elements of the network.

From rudeness and passive aggressiveness to sexual innuendo and outright trolling, Jeri finds herself deleting comments and blocking users on a daily basis. In this show we discuss the downsides of personal branding, and whether dealing with trolls and abuse is just something you have to accept if you have a strong online presence.

This episode of the podcast is supported by Podchaser Pro, making podcast discovery and analysis a breeze. Podchaser Pro builds on Podchaser’s best-in-class data set to provide access to reach, contacts, demographics and more, and bring radical efficiency to the process of discovering, qualifying, and contacting podcasts.

Subscribe to the podcast to receive new episodes automatically to your mobile or email. And if you enjoyed today’s show, please email it to a friend and/or share it on your favourite social media channels. I’d love to hear from you with any comments or thoughts. I read and reply to every single email, tweet or message. And finally, it would also be very awesome and hugely appreciated if you’d be able to take a moment to leave an honest review and rating for the podcast on iTunes or Podchaser, as this helps others discover Digital Download.

The Wall Street Journal’s coverage of whistleblower Francis Haughen’s leaked documents from inside Facebook make for fascinating and at times very disturbing reading. Among the core findings are the way the Facebook algorithm promotes division, how Facebook has a ‘white list’ of elite users who can do and say what they like, and how Instagram exacerbates body image issues among teenage girls. But most damning is that Facebook knows all of this and has done little to nothing to address it.

At a time when not only users but governments want answers, the timing of Facebook’s big corporate rebrand to Meta is tone deaf. And the whole concept of a Facebook-run ‘metaverse’ is disturbing. For a start, do people actually want this?

In this episode of the Digital Download podcast, I explore what the metaverse is and how a virtual reality world might impact us, and I look at the Wall Street Journal findings in a little more detail and try to ascertain what the implications of those are.

This episode of the podcast is supported by Podchaser Pro, making podcast discovery and analysis a breeze. Podchaser Pro builds on Podchaser’s best-in-class data set to provide access to reach, contacts, demographics and more, and bring radical efficiency to the process of discovering, qualifying, and contacting podcasts.

Subscribe to the podcast to receive new episodes automatically to your mobile or email. And if you enjoyed today’s show, please email it to a friend and/or share it on your favourite social media channels. I’d love to hear from you with any comments or thoughts. I read and reply to every single email, tweet or message. And finally, it would also be very awesome and hugely appreciated if you’d be able to take a moment to leave an honest review and rating for the podcast on iTunes or Podchaser, as this helps others discover Digital Download.

Share of search has been used in the advertising industry for years as a way to prove a causal link between advertising and business results. It follows the line of thought that one of the first things a person does if they become aware of something that interests them is to search for it on Google. So if you can track how many people search for your brand or product over time, you can start to correlate this heavily with core business outcomes.

While at first glance Share of Search may seem to have more in common with search engine optimisation (SEO) than communications and public relations, where or if your brand appears in search is irrelevant in this instance, as it is the intent of the user that matters. So understanding how your activity triggers internet searches is incredibly valuable. 

In this episode of the Digital Download podcast, I talk to Stella Bayles from Coverage Book and Answer the Public about where the Share of Search metric came from, how to calculate it, how to track search intent and what this proves from a communications perspective.

This episode of the podcast is supported by Podchaser Pro, making podcast discovery and analysis a breeze. Podchaser Pro builds on Podchaser’s best-in-class data set to provide access to reach, contacts, demographics and more, and bring radical efficiency to the process of discovering, qualifying, and contacting podcasts.

Subscribe to the podcast to receive new episodes automatically to your mobile or email. And if you enjoyed today’s show, please email it to a friend and/or share it on your favourite social media channels. I’d love to hear from you with any comments or thoughts. I read and reply to every single email, tweet or message. And finally, it would also be very awesome and hugely appreciated if you’d be able to take a moment to leave an honest review and rating for the podcast on iTunes or Podchaser, as this helps others discover Digital Download.

Measurement has been a monkey on the public relations industry’s back for as long as anyone can remember. But sometimes it helps to look at where the industry is now compared to where it was a few years ago and to determine whether progress is being made.

In this episode of the Digital Download podcast, that’s precisely what we’re doing. Richard Benson is co-founder of Nectarize, an evaluation platform that was devised to reflect core KPIs and measure cross-media activities and activations to determine business impact. Over the last six years, many thousands of reports have been put together using the tool, enabling Nectarize to produce a report on what PR professionals were measuring then, what they are measuring now, what progress has been made, and what best practice now looks like.

This episode of the podcast is supported by Podchaser Pro, making podcast discovery and analysis a breeze. Podchaser Pro builds on Podchaser’s best-in-class data set to provide access to reach, contacts, demographics and more, and bring radical efficiency to the process of discovering, qualifying, and contacting podcasts.

Subscribe to the podcast to receive new episodes automatically to your mobile or email. And if you enjoyed today’s show, please email it to a friend and/or share it on your favourite social media channels. I’d love to hear from you with any comments or thoughts. I read and reply to every single email, tweet or message. And finally, it would also be very awesome and hugely appreciated if you’d be able to take a moment to leave an honest review and rating for the podcast on iTunes or Podchaser, as this helps others discover Digital Download.

Do we need an app? It’s something that’s now heard very often in marketing circles, as if building, maintaining and marketing an app is the easiest thing in the world. But the technical complexity of ‘an app’, not to mention the competition for app space on our mobiles, cannot be underestimated.

In this episode of the Digital Download podcast, we talk about what it actually takes to build an app and have it approved by Apple and Google, what it takes to maintain that app in an ever-changing technical world, the technical and design factors that have to be considered, and how to go about marketing an app and getting it used.

The special guest in this show is Mark Stringer, co-founder of carbon negative navigation and carpool app SKOOT and founder of PR agency Pretty Green.

This episode of the podcast is supported by Podchaser Pro, making podcast discovery and analysis a breeze. Podchaser Pro builds on Podchaser’s best-in-class data set to provide access to reach, contacts, demographics and more, and bring radical efficiency to the process of discovering, qualifying, and contacting podcasts.

Subscribe to the podcast to receive new episodes automatically to your mobile or email. And if you enjoyed today’s show, please email it to a friend and/or share it on your favourite social media channels. I’d love to hear from you with any comments or thoughts. I read and reply to every single email, tweet or message. And finally, it would also be very awesome and hugely appreciated if you’d be able to take a moment to leave an honest review and rating for the podcast on iTunes or Podchaser, as this helps others discover Digital Download.

The last two years are starting to take their toll on us. Stories of struggling with the relentlessness of social and economic unrest are common, and motivation can be harder to come by than a full tank of petrol at the moment. On World Mental Health Day, we take a look at how those in marketing communications are particularly vulnerable.

We’re all hyper-connected. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp, TikTok and dozens of other apps compete for our attention on a daily basis. Those working in the communications industry are, arguably, more exposed than most given the nature of our jobs. So what affect is this having on us?

This is a special episode of the Digital Download Podcast originally recorded for Mental Health Awareness Week in 2019. I chat to Leanne Ehren and Alistair Beech, two communications professionals who have not only openly talked about their mental health issues, but who have campaigned to improve mental wellbeing in the workplace. We discuss the challenges of working in communications and ways that individuals and companies can address the issues.

This episode of the podcast is supported by Podchaser Pro, making podcast discovery and analysis a breeze. Podchaser Pro builds on Podchaser’s best-in-class data set to provide access to reach, contacts, demographics and more, and bring radical efficiency to the process of discovering, qualifying, and contacting podcasts.

Subscribe to the podcast to receive new episodes automatically to your mobile or email. And if you enjoyed today’s show, please email it to a friend and/or share it on your favourite social media channels. I’d love to hear from you with any comments or thoughts. I read and reply to every single email, tweet or message. And finally, it would also be very awesome and hugely appreciated if you’d be able to take a moment to leave an honest review and rating for the podcast on iTunes or Podchaser, as this helps others discover Digital Download.

The online abuse targeted at Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka after England’s Euro 2020 final defeat was sickening. And yet it was entirely predictable, and is the latest in a long line of serious trolling incidents involving public figures. The social networks seem either unwilling or unable to step in until after the fact, but this is simply not good enough anymore.

In today’s episode of the Digital Download podcast, we look at the issue of trolling through the lens of post-Euros racist abuse, we discuss the balance between social network, societal and governmental responsibility, and we debate the pros and cons of various potential solutions social networks could implement.

The special gust in this show is Julian Obubo, partner at brand communications agency Manifest, and campaigner for diversity and inclusion across the PR industry.

Subscribe to the podcast to receive new episodes automatically to your mobile or email. And if you enjoyed today’s show, please email it to a friend and/or share it on your favourite social media channels. I’d love to hear from you with any comments or thoughts. I read and reply to every single email, tweet or message. And finally, it would also be very awesome and hugely appreciated if you’d be able to take a moment to leave an honest review and rating for the podcast on iTunes or Podchaser, as this helps others discover Digital Download.

In the last few years the lack of diversity in the public relations industry and the over-indexing of private school-educated practitioners has come under increasing scrutiny. However, not much has changed.

A new charitable PR school project called Socially Mobile aims to tackle this. Focused on delivering management training to those from lower socio-economic backgrounds as well as under-represented and under-served groups, the course aims to increase the earning potential of practitioners.

In this episode of the Digital Download podcast, Socially Mobile founder Sarah Waddington CBE talks about what the course entails, how it came about and what her ambitions for the project are.

Subscribe to the podcast to receive new episodes automatically to your mobile or email. And if you enjoyed today’s show, please email it to a friend and/or share it on your favourite social media channels. I’d love to hear from you with any comments or thoughts. I read and reply to every single email, tweet or message. And finally, it would also be very awesome and hugely appreciated if you’d be able to take a moment to leave an honest review and rating for the podcast on iTunes or Podchaser, as this helps others discover Digital Download.