FIR Podcast Network

Robert Udowitz and Steve Drake of RFP Associates partner with organizations seeking to retain PR and public affairs agencies. They take years of their own experience on the agency side to help clients navigate the process more effectively.

On this episode of Chats with Chip, Robert and Steve offer helpful advice and useful tips for agencies as they respond to requests for proposals.

The duo view their mission as improving the RFP experience for both buyers and sellers. They want to see a better process that makes the right match.

During this conversation, Robert and Steve discuss:

* Choosing which RFP’s to participate in

* Setting the right expectations from the start

* Handling requests with some elements outside of the agency’s core expertise

* Understanding what clients are looking for in the RFP response

* Asking the right questions before submitting an RFP

[read the transcript]

Most agencies want their employees to get involved in developing new business, but how do you properly reward them when they do? That’s the subject that Chip and Gini explore in this week’s episode.

Gini says the key is that “you certainly want to incentivize people and incentivize them at a level that they want to participate in business development and can participate in business development, but also not eat into your profitability.”

Whatever plan you come up with, Chip advises, “you have to have a policy in writing on something like this. Anytime you have a commission scheme involving employees, put it in writing, so that there’s no misunderstanding.”

Chip also says that agency owners need to remember that “whatever you’re incentivizing is what you will tend to get, and so if you are incentivizing revenue, people will do whatever they can to acquire that revenue, regardless of how profitable it is.”

Gini underscored that “this is another situation where it depends, and it depends on who’s on your team and what they’re motivated by.”

In the end, the best principle may be to keep it simple because “you don’t want it to be so complex that nobody understands it,” explains Chip.

[read the transcript]

A change of pace for FIR

The FIR Podcast is one of the longest continually-produced podcasts for communications pros. Since 2005, Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson have been providing insight into the communications trends and developments that are important to communications practitioners.

But now they are dialing back their production schedule to once a month. And as podcast producers who have followed in their footsteps, we’re glad that they are continuing. Because if you are a communications pro, you’re sure to learn something useful with each and every FIR podcast.

So, kudos Shel and Neville for finding a way to keep it going and keep it fresh.

GarageBand: Creating dreams

It’s been fifteen years since Apple first offered GarageBand with Macs. Since then, it’s become available for PCs and iOS as well. And that means there’s a whole generation of musicians and podcasters who have brought their ideas to life using Apple’s free software. In fact, we use GarageBand to mix and produce the Inside PR podcast. And it couldn’t be easier to do, thanks to the simple, intuitive interface.

So, here’s to GarageBand. And here’s to the community of creators who have grown up around it. And here’s to Apple for giving us this incredibly useful software.

You’re just not important enough for us to take action

The abuse of social media by foreign or malevolent agents is not just confined to the United States. It is a global problem. But that doesn’t mean that the social and search platforms are giving it the same attention in countries other than the United States. Indeed, you need look no farther than across the border to the north to Canada to see Facebook and Google taking very different approaches to the responsibility that national legislators and regulators say they should take on. In this tally, Facebook gains a point. Google loses a point.

If you’re not part of the solution

Facebook’s local news support project, Today In, underlines the news deserts that have been created by the diminution out of the display ad economy that local newspapers relied on. And in doing so, it drives home that the social and search platforms efforts to “support” journalism are not adequately addressing the problems they have created. It’s time for radically different thinking.

This post was originally published on the Inside PR podcast blog.

Is Mark Zuckerberg’s concept of privacy your concept of privacy? Probably not. And this week we discuss Zuckerberg’s ongoing repositioning of Facebook as “private.”

In this episode, Mitchell Levy (http://aha.pub/CreatingThoughtLeaders), TEDx speaker and the AHA Guy at AHAthat (https://AHAthat.com), introduces his co-host for the month, #ThoughtLeader Ronan Leonard (http://aha.pub/RonanLeonard), also known as the Mastermind Guy, who enables business leaders to gain more revenue through that essential thing called ROI, Return On Intellect. He facilitates discussions and intensive sets of training that enable people to find their hidden genius and fully utilize it for self and organizational development.

This episode got more exciting when positive business strategist, Tanya Lacy (http://aha.pub/TanyaLacy), joined the discussion and shared her thoughts on how to bring out people’s untapped genius and potential while continually promoting boundless business improvements.

 Tanya Lacy shared her thoughts on Masterminding, which is unraveling greater power in synchronizing a diverse set of talents through the establishment of a genuinely caring support system. She and co-host Ronan Leonard made amazing revelations about how organizations can optimize people and their full talents through collaboration and co-creation. From this episode, we were able to pull out over 50 AHAmessages that all business leaders should ponder. No matter how your business is going right now, these brilliant thoughts from Tanya Lacy and Ronan Leonard will surely help you understand the essence of collaboration among the people in the business.

Here are a few of the AHAmessages that were curated from these leaders’ inspiring and eye-opening thoughts, which are all about winning big in the business through a collaborative business leadership approach:

* Spotting others’ potential is easy, but appreciating it and drawing it out of them the right way is more difficult. #Collaboration http://aha.pub/TanyaLacy

* Business owners and managers should realize that they can’t figure out everything all by themselves. No one has all the answers. #Collaboration among other members of the organization will make a huge difference. http://aha.pub/RonanLeonard.

* To be a #Mastermind, you need to learn how to support yourself and then connect with society to both learn and provide learning. #Collaboration http://aha.pub/TanyaLacy.

* Everyone is a catalyst of other people’s potentials. Are you a catalyst? #Collaboration #Collaboration http://aha.pub/RonanLeonard.

* Effective #Mentoring begins where #Ego ends. #Collaboration http://aha.pub/TanyaLacy.

To learn more about Thought Leadership and how it can help you be successful, subscribe to the channel: http://youtube.com/user/thoughtleaderlife.

Interview with Travel blogger and photographer Gary Arndt about Influencer Marketing.

Gary Arndt is an awarding winning blogger and travel photographer who has been traveling around the world since 2007, taking him through 200 countries and territories and over 380 UNESCO World Heritage sites. His blog Everything Everywhere has won numerous awards, including being named one of the Top 25 Blogs on the Internet in 2010 by Time Magazine. He’s won so many awards that this introduction would have been 10 minutes long if I hadn’t edited it, but, just to name a few, the North American Travel Journalist Association (NATJA) has given him a Gold Medal in the Travel Blog category as well as declaring him Travel Photographer of the Year in 2013 & 2015. And then. Just to fill the space, SATW gave him the Travel Photographer of the Year award in 2014. He has recently launched a new online course called “working with travel bloggers and travel influencers” which is designed help destination marketers differentiate the good, bad and ugly pitches and maximize their investment.

Top Travel Blogs for 2019

Hosts: Leif Pettersen of Leif Pettersen PR and Chris Christensen of BloggerBridge.com and AmateurTraveler.com.

Chip and Gini discuss an uncomfortable topic for many agency owners: how and when to say no to prospects and fire clients.

It all comes down to the right fit. Successful agencies make sure that they can meet the expectations of their clients — and do so profitably.

Those agencies that really excel also make sure that they can tell a clear, consistent story with their client roster.

And that means saying no to new business and letting clients go.

Gini says agency owners need to ask themselves, “Can you deliver? Are their expectations wacky or not? Does your team have the capacity?”

She explains why it is important to turn down and walk away from business: “When you say no, it allows you to say yes to the right kinds of clients.”

Chip notes that “the irony is, by firing your client or saying no to a prospect, you have almost unintentionally increased your credibility, and in some ways, probably increased the perceived value of what you’re providing, because it is pretty uncommon for service providers to tell a client or prospect to go away.”

He explained that many agency owners just keep servicing the same clients and responding to whatever business comes in because it’s the easiest route to take. However, he warns that “momentum is the enemy of good business decision making.”

“It is definitely hard to turn business away. It’s definitely hard to fire clients, but it always works out in the end — always,” Gini says.

[read the transcript]

Paul kicks off with a short rant about the lack of rigor and news value of surveys, and how marketers should spend more time vetting their results to determine what questions/objections they’re likely to get. With the release next week of the Verizon Data Breach Report setting a high bar, it is a timely topic.

This week we saw a tweet from Chase bank that not only fell flat but incurred many folks’ antipathy. It was so tone deaf that it was hard to even understand how the bank could have put it out there. This incident, combined with the offensive NY Times International edition political cartoon that was published last week,  reinforces the need to be more careful about what your brand shares socially.

Speaking of social shares, this article by Bloomberg’s BHive research outfit has a lot to say about ways they found to increase the sharing of their news articles from mobile devices. As more and more news is read on these devices, content providers have to do a better job of not cluttering up  small screens with extraneous ads and other diversions. Bloomberg was able to improve engagement by a significant amount with just doing a few simple tweaks to their stories. One key point: They interviewed actual readers.

The Workamajig blog’s post on how Voice Search is Changing B2B Marketing (And What You Can Do About It) is well worth your time. Consider that voice searches are by definition conversational. People don’t speak in keywords. They ask “What’s the height of the Empire State building?” not “Empire State building height”. Voice opens up new opportunities for content marketing. Republishing your content as an Alexa skill, for instance, can bring you a whole new set of listeners. In fact, if you look at the best reviewed Business & Finance skills on the Alexa store right now, you’ll see content-focused skills dominate the list. David met one vendor called VoiceXP that can help you create your own voice apps. Clearly this will grow in importance in the near future.

Finally, we note this analysis by our colleague Mike Vizard in the Barracuda blog about how the Russian hacking of the DNC back in 2016 went down, as documented in the Mueller report. It all started with a spear phishing email. You have been warned.

Google takes a pass on carrying political advertising in Canada. And there are reports that Cision is up for sale.

The first monthly episode of “For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report” features co-hosts Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz discussing the following topics:

* How China is shaping the future of shopping — it’s online, social, and highly appealing to Gen Z

* Media coverage of local news is evaporating. Should business pick up the slack?

* Customer reviews are the new content marketing, says Jay Baer

* Movements mean more than brand purpose. Just look at Pornhub’s new movement to save the bees.

* The UK government has added 12,000 pieces of information to Google Assistant and Amazon’s Alexa

* When you think of Augmented Reality, do you think of audio? You should.

* Dan York reports on MindNode 6, WordPress 5.2, Pocket, Minnesota’s “Right to Repair” legislation, and Mozilla’s move away from IRC.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog.

The next episode of For Immediate Release will be posted on Monday, April 29.

Links from This Week’s Episode

* The Future of Shopping Is Already Happening in China

* Warren Buffett Sees Most Newspapers as ‘Toast’ After Ad Decline

* For many rural residents in U.S., local news media mostly don’t cover the area where they live

* Why is LinkedIn producing original journalism? LinkedIn editor-at-large Jessi Hempel explains.

* The job of the future is editor in chief

* Alabama News Center

* FIR Interview with Ike Pigott on the Alabama News Center

* Customer Reviews are the New Content Marketing

* Purpose is Dead. Long Live Movements!

* Pornhub Wants to Save the Bees With (What Else?) Bee Porn

* Patagonia Takes A Stand Against Companies That Aren’t Working To Better The Environment

* UK government adds ‘12,000 pieces of information’ to Google Assistant and Alexa

* This Augmented Reality Audio Podcast Brings the Camino De Santiago to Life Everywhere

* Bose brings audio AR shades and festival content to Coachella

Links from Dan York’s Report