FIR Interviews

Blockchain, says Phil Gomes, has developed enough and is so imminent a factor in multiple dimensions of business, that communicators no longer have an excuse to ignore it. The landscape is filled with startups seeking to solve long-standing business problems and disrupt current business processes in everything from payments to identity and reputation, from data analytics to data provenance, from the financial services infrastructure to supply chains.

Communicators will be explaining the dramatic changes their employers or clients are going through because of blockchain — both the opportunities they are leveraging and the disruption blockchain is inflicting on them. But blockchain will have a direct impact on communication processes and tools, as well. There are blockchain startups focused on media, advertising, and social networks.

Gomes, senior vice president of U.S. B2B Digital at Edelman, has been studying blockchain and its impact on PR, marketing, and communications before most of us had ever heard the word. He recently authored a white paper, “Blockchain Technology: The Marketing Value of Digital Permanence,” published by the American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA). The paper makes a case for marketing and communication use of blockchain and introduces readers to some of the startups whose work will affect the way communication work gets done.

In this FIR Interview, host Shel Holtz talks with Phil about the paper and other dimensions of blockchain that will soon be part of communication workflows and processes.

Connect with Phil on Twitter at @PhilGomes.

FIR Interviews are sponsored by Thornley Fallis, the public engagement specialists. If you are looking for tools and up to date techniques to engage with your community, Thornley Fallis can help. Find them at thornleyfallis.com.

About our conversation partner:

Phil Gomes is a senior vice president of U.S. B2B Digital at Edelman. He has more than 20 years of experience in promoting and integrating new and emerging technologies, working in Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, and Chicago, where he currently resides. He is a founding fellow and advisory board member for The Conference Board’s Society for New Communications Research and the director of communications for the Chicago Blockchain Center, a public/private partnership. Phil has been exploring blockchain technology since 2014, open source software since 1994, and keeps a clandestine Linux machine under his desk at work, because reasons.

The post FIR Interview: Phil Gomes on Blockchain and the Marketing Value of Digital Permanence appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Employee advocacy (or ambassador) programs once were rare; the companies that offered them were the subjects of interviews (like this one on FIR Interviews back in 2012, with Sara Folkerts talking about the Sprint Ninjas program). Today, it seems like most companies have one and those that don’t are planning one.

Actually, that’s what the data says, too. Jen McClure, CEO of JEM Consulting and Advisory Services, has released the results of JEM’s second annual State of Employee Advocacy Survey.  In this FIR Interview, host Shel Holtz talks with Jen about the connection between employee advocacy and social selling, whether employees who participate in an employee advocacy should have their involvement reflected in their performance evaluations, the role of advocacy amplification apps (and whether they can constitute an entire advocacy program), and some of the challenges of maintaining enthusiasm among ambassadors once a program is up and running. You can get more information in the press release covering survey highlights.

Jen is planning a one-day Conference Board seminar in which she will unveil the complete findings of the research, along with presentations by program leaders from 3M, Cancer Treatment Centers of America, FedEx, and Thomson Reuters. The seminar is set for Wednesday, September 27, at the American Management Association’s conference center in San Francisco. You can register here; use the code FS1.

Connect with Jen on Twitter at @JenMcClure_JEM.

FIR Interviews are sponsored by Thornley Fallis, the public engagement specialists. If you are looking for tools and up to date techniques to engage with your community, Thornley Fallis can help. Find them at thornleyfallis.com.

About Our Conversation Partner

Jennifer McClure is CEO of JEM Consulting, LLC. Prior to founding JEM, Jen was VP of Digital & Social Media and the head of the Digital Center of Excellence at Thomson Reuters. She was Managing Director of Re:Imagine Group, a consulting firm focused on helping clients to re-­‐imagine their business models for the digital age; CMO of Redwood Collaborative Media, a start-­‐up focused on building professional online communities for technology professionals; and Managing Director of Albrycht McClure & Partners, a strategic marketing and communications consulting firm, specializing in serving high-­‐tech Silicon Valley start-­‐ups. She also held marketing, public relations and financial management roles at Ziff­‐Davis and Ketchum Public Relations.

The post FIR Interview: Jen McClure on the State of Employee Advocacy appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Measuring social media has been one of the biggest challenges organizations have faced. It has been the subject of countless blog posts, reports, studies, and books. There is even debate about what to measure; the International for the Evaluation and Measurement of Communication (AMEC) introduced a framework that suggests measurement methods for assessing public relations activity, intermediary effect, and target audience effect.

Engagement has emerged as a key focus of social media measurement and is at the center of a new rating methodology introduced recently by the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA). In a white paper written by Judith Platz and John Ragsdale, the TSIA asserts that more than half of its members are engaged in some kind of social listening or monitoring. The paper offers a means of turning the information that results from that monitoring into “a scorecard to understand how each customer’s social activity is promoting or detracting from the brand.”

In this FIR Interview, host Shel Holtz spoke with Platz and Ragsdale about the motivation for developing the rating process and scorecard, the thinking behind low- and high-engagement activities, and how TSIA members (which includes the likes of Honeywell, Panasonic, NCR, Symantec, and Unisys) have responded to the rating.

Note: The interview was recorded using WebEx’s recording utility.

FIR Interviews are sponsored by Thornley Fallis, the public engagement specialists. If you are looking for tools and up to date techniques to engage with your community, Thornley Fallis can help. Find them at thornleyfallis.com.

About our Conversation Partners

Judith Platz is vice president of research, Support Services, for TSIA. During her over 25 years of customer support experience, she has been responsible for supervising and coordinating multiple functional, strategic, organizational development and technical work streams, including technical support, account management, business consulting, implementation management, and training.

John Ragsdale is vice president of research, Technology and Social, for TSIA. His area of expertise is in creating strategies for improving the service operations and overall customer experience by leveraging innovative technology. Ragsdale drives TSIA’s highly regarded technology research agenda, delivering insightful, thought-leadership research and analysis on the most pressing business issues facing services leaders to enable them to better plan and execute their service strategies. He is also author of the book, Lessons Unlearned, which chronicles his 25-year career inside the customer service industry.

The post FIR Interview: Judith Platz and John Ragsdale on TSIA’s B2B Social Engagement Rating appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Most companies have jumped on the social media train. Some even have plans to deal with the issues that arise when something goes awry. Those plans, though, are most often kept in the marketing or social media departments. The company’s risk manager (or whichever department manages risk) is rarely looped in. Since most digital and social media involves third-party sites and doesn’t touch seem to touch the company’s own networks, IT is also often on the outside, other than playing a role in the development of standard computer usage policies.

Yet the risks posed by the common use of digital and social media include several that social media and marketing teams typically don’t consider. In early July, JEM Consulting & Advisory Services released the results of a new study, 2017 State of Digital & Social Media Risk. In addition to not having all the right players at the table when developing processes and policies for digital and social media, too many companies don’t even have policies and even fewer conduct all-employee training.

In this FIR Interview, host Shel Holtz spoke with Jen McClure, CEO of JEM, about the study. Jen presented a webinar to introduce the study results, which is also available.

Connect with Jen on Twitter at @JenMcClure_JEM.

About Our Conversation Partner

Jennifer McClure is CEO of JEM Consulting, LLC. Prior to founding JEM, Jen was VP of Digital & Social Media and the head of the Digital Center of Excellence at Thomson Reuters. She was Managing Director of Re:Imagine Group, a consulting firm focused on helping clients to re-­‐imagine their business models for the digital age; CMO of Redwood Collaborative Media, a start-­‐up focused on building professional online communities for technology professionals; and Managing Director of Albrycht McClure & Partners, a strategic marketing and communications consulting firm, specializing in serving high-­‐tech Silicon Valley start-­‐ups. She also held marketing, public relations and financial management roles at Ziff­‐Davis and Ketchum Public Relations.

The post FIR Interviews: Jen McClure on Digital and Social Media Risk appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

What can be better than combining two of your passions to launch a new business?

That’s exactly what David Meerman Scott did when he opened the doors of Signature Tones, which he describes as a “sonic branding studio” that he started with his partner, musician Juanito Pascual. The agency, which lets Scott apply his marketing skills to his love of music, creates sonic logos and original music designed to become as recognizable when heard as logos and trademarks are when seen.

If the idea sounds (no pun intended) a little wishful, consider the Intel Inside tone, the NBC tone, and the sound Skype plays when you get a call. Even the Harvard Business Review has talked about the notion of what your brand sounds like, publishing in 2014 that the practice is also known as “sound branding” and “acoustic branding. According to the article, “Audio branding entails the creation of an entire audio language for the brand based on its essence, values, promise, and personality — a language that gets expressed across all touch points, from the web and apps to trade shows to TV to the retail environment and even the product itself.” The article also notes that the French national railway, SNCF, which cared “an audio DNA with the goal of communicating their leadership along with the comfort and caring that distinguished the brand.”

With audio consumption on the rise — through podcasts; audio digital assistants like Siri, Google Assistant, and Cortana; and the rise of smart audio like the Amazon Alexa and Google Home — the opportunity to make an impression and create an instant connection between a sound and a brand is growing more and more important.

In this FIR Interview, host Shel Holtz talks with Scott about his inspiration for the company, the process he and Pascual use, a case study from one of their early clients, and some of the uses for sonic branding that probably haven’t occurred to you yet.

FIR Interviews are sponsored by Thornley Fallis, the public engagement specialists. If you are looking for tools and up to date techniques to engage with your community, Thornley Fallis can help. Find them at thornleyfallis.com.

About Our Conversation Partner

In 2002, David Meerman Scott left big company life and began writing books, speaking at conferences and events, and serving on advisory boards of organizations including HubSpot, where he also servse as Marketer in Residence. His current portfolio of advisory clients also includes Mynd, Expertfile, YayPay, RISEcx, Set The Set, VisibleGains, SlapFive, and GutCheck as well as non-profits including the Grateful Dead Archive at University of California Santa Cruz and HeadCount. He is the author or co-author of 10 books – three are international bestsellers. David is best known for The New Rules of Marketing & PR, now in its 5th edition, which has been translated into 26 languages from Albanian to Vietnamese, with over 375,000 copies sold so far. He also authored Real-Time Marketing & PR, a Wall Street Journal bestseller, and his newest, The New Rules of Sales & Service.

The post FIR Interviews: David Meerman Scott on Sonic Branding appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.