FIR Interviews

If you have heard of blockchains at all, it most likely has been because you have an interest in Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency that has risen in popularity to the point that you can use them to pay for goods at some mainstream outlets (like Amazon, Target, CVS, eBay, and Dell).

Phil Gomes sees a need for PR practitioners to understand blockchains for purposes beyond Bitcoin; he envisions PR uses for the technology and has elaborated on those uses in posts on his blog. In this FIR Interview, Phil — senior vice president at Edelman Digital — joins host Shel Holtz to discuss blockchains and how they could become a standard PR tool.

Blockchains are databases that maintain a continuously growing list of data records that are hardened against tampering and revision, even by operators of the data store’s nodes (according to Wikipedia). That may sound useful for a cryptocurrency, but Phil has envisioned other uses to which blockchains will likely be put, uses that will have an impact on the practice of public relations.

About our conversation partner

Phil Gomes is widely  recognized for his expertise in global public relations, reputation management, crisis communications, strategic communications, online community engagement, corporate social media, and social business transformation. Phil has an established, consistent track record of identifying trends early (e.g., social media, bitcoin, blockchain technology, and Wikipedia engagement) and contextualizing them for public relations. He brings to his work a unique, cross-industry understanding of the critical intersection between corporate reputation, online communities, online governance, and regulatory matters. In September of this year, Phil developed his role as senior vice president at Edelman Digital. He focuses on preparing clients for advanced issues and special situations regarding online corporate reputation and emerging technologies. Before assuming his new role, Phil spent move than seven years as Edelman’s senior vice president of Digital Integration.

Phil founded CREWE (Corporate Representatives for Ethical Wikipedia Editing), a Facebook group dedicated to improving the relationship between public relations practitioners and the Wikipedia community. He is a founding fellow of the Society for New Communication Research, and serves on the ethics committee of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association.

Resources

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The collaborative (or sharing) economy is heating up, with dramatic increases in both the number of startups that employ the model and the number of consumers who use them. In its annual survey on the collaborative economy, Crowd Companies (working in partnership with Vision Critical) has crunched the data to identify (among other things) key opportunities for traditional companies to compete as collaborative-economy companies increasingly threaten to take market share away from them.

In this FIR Interview, Shel Holtz talks with Crowd Companies founder and CEO Jeremiah Owyang about the results of the study, with a focus on the three primary ways businesses can remain competitive as the collaborative economy continues to heat up. Jeremiah and Shel also digress into related topics, including the impact autonomous vehicles will have on both traditional and collaborative companies.

The full report, summarized in a Crowd Companies blog post, is available here. Below is an infographic that summarizes the main competitive opportunities:

Jeremiah helped major companies navigate the first phase of sharing: social media. He’s committed to helping companies through the second phase of sharing, as people share and create the physical world around them. Over the course of his career, Jeremiah has identified big trends before they happen, and helped major companies through the transition.

Jeremiah was a founding partner and research director at Altimeter Group, and currently serves on Altimeter’s on board of advisors. Before that, he was a Forrester Analyst covering social computing for the interactive marketer. Jeremiah was also Global Web Marketing at Hitachi Data Systems, where he launched the social media program Jeremiah has been advising and influencing business leaders globally. Jeremiah is a professional speaker and keynotes business conferences around the globe. His online publications often receive over 100k views from his blog, Web Strategy.

The post FIR Interview: Jeremiah Owyang on competing in the collaborative economy appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Good morning,

In a recent panel discussion, Startup Saturday Bangalore, had an opportunity to meet with Veda, head of marketing for StayZilla, also known as the airbnb of India. https://www.stayzilla.com

About our Conversation Partners: Vedanarayanan V. Stayzilla.com

Vedanarayanan possesses more than a decade of professional experience, spanning: E-commerce Management, Digital Marketing, Team Building, Process & Framework Establishment, P&L Management, Financial Services Consulting & Business Development. He heads Marketing at www.stayzilla.com – the largest online marketplace for stays, in one of the fastest growing ecommerce economies in the world – India.

Stayzilla is India’s largest & fastest growing end to end managed marketplace for Stays with over 32,000 properties across 4000+ towns spanning the length & breadth of the country. Vedanarayanan previously headed the digital marketing & product management functions at www.cbazaar.com; the world’s largest online Indian Ethnic Wear store. Vedanarayanan also moonlights as a fiction author, with dreams of making it big in the literary world – having published two eBooks, as part of ”The Adventures of Prince Surya” series.

Contact: https://twitter.com/contactveda

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In this interview, FIR’s Shel Holtz talks with Babbler CEO and co-founder Hannah Oiknine about Babblr’s origins, its features, the process of connecting reporters through a strictly opt-in methodology, and its success at converting pitches to published stories.

Hannah Oiknine, CEO and Founder of Babbler. Hannah founded Babbler in 2013 with her sister Sarah Azan, at 26 years old, just after receiving her diploma in Science in Business Management (Grenoble Graduate School of Business, MBA). Before founding Babbler, Hannah had experience in top American companies in Paris: Trade Marketing at Coca Cola in 2011, Kinect for Xbox 360 Launch(Microsoft) in 2012. Passionate about innovation, she always wanted to be an entrepreneur and create something ‘new’.

After a chat with her sister, who used to be an independent PR pro, the entrepreneurial PR pros recognized a fundamental problem: there are 5 publicists for every reporter and PR messages are not getting through. While media has gone digital, PR pros continue to contact reporters with emails that go unread and share content in numerous platforms that waste time and resources.

Then they created Babbler. Babbler is the only opt-in network that lets media and PR pros instantly share news, content and messages in a single platform. By moving PR out of the inbox, Babbler is helping journalists and PR professionals meaningfully connect.

Babbler won the French 2013 Microsoft Imagine Cup and is listed in Challenges Magazine’s 2014 Top 100 Best Start-ups To Invest In. Babbler has received significant investment to date from Fred & Farid Group, Fashion Capital Partners and high-level angel investors in the PR and advertising industries.

After having a great success in France, Babbler is launching the service in the US in September 2015 and Hannah Oiknine is in charge of international deployment of the company, she is now located in New York City.

The post Interview: Hannah Oiknine, CEO of media relations solution Babbler appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Much of real-time marketing — especially newsjacking — requires insights into what people are talking about right now. There have been ways to assess what’s hot in social circles, including Twitter trending topics, but little has been available to help marketers and communicators grasp stories people are buzzing about in real time across the broad spectrum of social and digital media.

Enter News Ninja, a labor of love from Infegy, which provides intelligence from social media data. The free site collects data from Infegy’s database of online content and uses linguistics to determine the key topics and themes under discussion by major news outlets, influences, and the overall online population. The result is a list — updated every 10 minutes — of the top 45 stories driving online conversations.

In this FIR interview, Shel Holtz chats with Infegy Marketing Directory Rion Martin about the News Ninja, its origins, its future, and the uses to which communicators can put it.

About our Conversation Partner

Rion Martin is the marketing director of Infegy, provider of social media intelligence technology for marketing and research professionals. In this role, he is responsible for developing and leading Infegy’s global marketing program to boost brand awareness and market share, working closely with ad agencies, market researchers, and consumer insight teams. He also curates the Infegy blog and manages all content marketing initiatives.

Rion joined Infegy in 2013, bringing more than eight years of experience in technology and digital marketing consulting. Prior to joining Infegy, Rion worked as the program manager of marketing and instructional tools at his alma mater, the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where he focused on implementing technologies to provide high-quality client experiences.

Having started multiple services businesses throughout high school and college, Rion’s entrepreneurial spirit led him to start Audagy.fm, an online music streaming service for indie music. He also founded Osireon Digital in 2006, a digital marketing consulting agency focused on digital strategy, web development, system design and CRM systems.

Rion earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Kansas and an MBA from the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Connect with Rion on Twitter at @RionMartin.

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