FIR Podcast Network

In our role as journalists, we’ve been deluged with hundreds of pitches for GDPR-related stories, which went into effect last week. It didn’t help matters that on the first day the UK commissioner’s website was down for a couple of hours, an Austrian privacy advocate hit Facebook and Google with billions of euros in lawsuits and the privacy browser plug in Ghostery sent out emails about its change in policy, but inadvertently cc’d 500 user names in each batch of email.

Given all the pitches we’ve had over the last year, we’ve had to be selective about what got our attention, so in this show we discuss what did and didn’t work. Among the items we followed up on was this interview with the former head of compliance for Visa in Europe, who now works for a security vendor. And Imperva put together this interesting infographic (shown here in part) on what the 72-hour compliance deadline really means.

There has been plenty of research on readiness, but the findings were all over the map, which undermined the credibility of many surveys. Paul wrote about an IBM study that showed the positive effects of compliance, a breath of fresh air at a time when most coverage was negative. Then there was this story about how criminals are using GDPR as the basis for phishing attacks, with AirBnB users targeted in particular.

Another pitch from Veritas showed that companies risk going out of business because of the cost of complying with the regulations. And then there was Ponemon’s study last month that gave a comprehensive and credible overview of the issues. Paul wrote another story about how IBM is using Apache Atlas as an organizing framework to help its customers build compliance measures. The interesting angle there was open source. 

Among the worst pitches was the company that tried to make the case that GDPR would seriously inhibit the ability of companies to maintain records about their own employees. In fact, the legislation says nothing about that. The company promised to follow up with a reference to the relevant passage in the regulation, but it was never heard from again.

One of the best sources of reliable information is security consultant David Froud. He complained that many companies did nothing, or in the case of few American daily newspapers, even blocked European IP addresses. “Companies can’t even figure out how to communicate to their customer base what are the chances they can perform appropriate risk assessments?” he asked, somewhat incredulously. Froud told his readers not to be a muppet, meaning just doing nothing. After all, they have had two years to prepare.

Paul has actually read the entire GDPR document, which is not overly long, and suggests it should be every marketer’s starting point when pitching GDPR, or any compliance-related story.

We conclude our podcast with some lessons to be learned for future pitches, to ensure that they don’t end up in the trash heap. 

Neville Hobson joins host Shel Holtz for the June installment of “The Hobson & Holtz Report,” with conversations about…

* GDPR, which officially went into effect on Friday

* BuzzFeed’s live-streaming experiment on Twitch

* CIPR’s white paper on the role if Artificial Intelligence in public relations

* Google is under pressure to up its podcasting game

* Google lets you see your history of interactions and it’s a lot less creepy than Facebook

* Generation Z will bypass politics and engage via consumerism

* Dan York reports on GDPR, Airbnb’s travel “stories,” Anchor’s new mobile import feature, and WordPress’s 15th anniversary

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.

About our guest

Neville Hobson was co-host of The Hobson & Holtz Report for over 10 years. For over 15 years, Neville has been a voice of experience and influence when it comes to speaking about digital technologies, disruptive change in workplaces and marketplaces, relevant trends to pay close attention to, and what it all means for your business. His experiences embrace deep understanding and subject-matter expertise in contemporary business issues that include social, digital and cognitive technologies, connecting that with a career in traditional public relations, marketing communication, employee compensation and benefits communication, and investor relations. Based in the Thames Valley some 30 miles west of London, Neville works either from his home office or from a client’s location; or from wherever he has a good network connection.

Links from this episode

* GDPR: ‘Don’t panic!’ data watchdog tells firms

* Your Data Matters Twitter account from ICO News

* New data protection laws put people first

* GDPR: Going Beyond Borders

* GDPR proves that tech giants can be tamed

* Facebook and Google hit with $8.8 billion in lawsuits on day one of GDPR

* With Facebook Live views falling, BuzzFeed looks to Twitch

* Humans still needed: AI use in PR to treble in three years, report suggests

* ‘Humans still needed’ – research project reveals impact of artificial intelligence on public relations

* Humans still needed: An analysis of skills and tools in public relations, PDF from the Chartered Institute of Public Relations

* VIDEO: Here’s how Publicis Groupe’s AI-powered Marcel will look and work

* ‘A podcast beast just sitting there...

According to a recent New York Times article, “Chief executives across the business world are increasingly wading into political issues that were once considered off limits — like gun control and climate change — but they might not be moving fast enough.”

The Edelman Trust Barometer (cited in the article) backs up that assertion. Sixty-four percent of respondents believe CEOs should take the lead on change instead of waiting for government to impose it. Eighty-four percent expect CEOs to inform conversations and policy debates on one or more issues. And 56% said, “they have no respect for CEOs who remain silent on important issues.”

The evidence of CEOs staking out positions on which they once remained silent is everywhere. Consider that, in the wake of the Douglas High School shooting in Florida, CitiGroup and Bank of America enacted policies regarding their relationships with gun makers. Other companies have taken sides on immigration, race relations, income disparity, sustainability, sexual orientation and gender rights, and a range of other issues that can be divisive.

In addition to consumers supporting organizations taking sides, employees are also in favor of their companies taking action. A 2016 Public Affairs Council found 70% of respondents said employees had influenced their companies’ decisions to get involved in social issues.

On Thursday, May 17, four IABC Fellows participated in a live online conversation about the emerging role of CEOs as the new global community leaders. The topic was also IABC’s editorial theme for May: “CEOs and other leaders are increasingly looked to weigh in on social and political issues. But how do you determine when your leaders should take a stand? We’ll examine key indicators for when leaders should make statements and review research about this trend.”

The panel included James Lukaszewski, Ned Lundquist, and Leticia Narvaez. FIR podcast host Shel Holtz moderated.

About the panel

James E. Lukaszewski, America’s Crisis Guru ®, is a bestselling author, national speaker, and trusted strategic advisor to FPO and NPO business operators and leaders during crises, disasters, reputation attacks, contentiousness and when the boss’s future is at stake. Corporate Legal Times listed him as “one of 22 crisis counselors to have in your speed dial when all hell breaks loose.” For more than 30 years, he has confidentially guided hundreds of company leaders thru tough, touchy, sensitive situations. Lukaszewski’s strategies inspire constructive, ethical problem resolving management behavior. A powerful and inspirational speaker, he teaches executives and managers the lessons he has learned. A prolific author, he is quoted and interviewed often as one of the most recognizable leaders in his profession. Lukaszewski is on the web at www.e911.com.

Edward “Ned” Lundquist, a retired U.S. Navy captain with 33 years of professional public affairs and strategic communications experience. He is a principal science writer at MCR Federal in McLean, Virginia, supporting government clients; and has his own company, Echo Bridge LLC, which provides outreach and advocacy support to commercial clients. He served on active duty for 24 years in the U.S. Navy as a surface warfare officer and public affairs specialist. Captain Lundquist was a Pentagon spokesman with the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, Director of the Fleet Home Town News Center, and director of public affairs and corporate communications for the Navy Exchange Service Command. His last tour of duty was commanding the 450 men and women of the Naval Media Center. He is an accredited business communicator and award-winning communicator who served as president of IABC/Hampton Roads and IABC/Washington,

Klout is dead. The news wasn’t a surprise, and the announcement from its current owners at Lithium didn’t leave anyone tearing up. The idea of boiling influence down to a single number always struck us as overly simplistic. And the tools to measure influence are so much more sophisticated now than in Klout’s heyday.

But we should pause and understand why Klout fell into disuse and what marketers can learn about measuring the effectiveness of their social media campaigns. It’s also a good time to look at what other tools are available that are useful, such as LinkedIn Social Selling Index, which gives your account various scores and then breaks them down into four components that have a little more meaning. You can see how you rank within your industry and within your LinkedIn network. There’s also Twitter Analytics, which tracks changes in your Twitter engagement through five different elements: tweets, tweet impressions, profile visits, mentions, and followers. Again, one number doesn’t really describe the range of influence that a social network provides, and you might want to focus on one or two elements as you measure your own reach. 

David reviewed social media marketing tools many years ago and certainly that universe has seen some evolution, but SproutSocial, SimplyMeasured, Looker and Adobe’s Marketing Cloud are all still available and very reasonable measurement tools as you construct your campaigns. And as general purpose business intelligence tools such as Microsoft’s PowerBI and Domo become easier to use, they can be used for this purpose.

We also touch upon another looming deadline this week, with the GDPR regulations coming into full force. Paul has written a piece about executives are turning more positive on its potential and also using the compliance deadline to effect some positive changes in their organizations’ privacy and data protection policies.

 

 

Gary Vaynerchuk is a Social Media Marketing influencer, well know author, Youtube and a Podcast host. In this week’s podcast we have extracted the top 10 skills that every Digital Marketers should learn from Gary Vee ! Do What You Love !

The 151st episode of Digital India Podcast on FIR Podcast Network is brought to you by staff and students of  Web Marketing Academy

 

Gary Vaynerchuk is the chairman of VaynerX, a modern-day media and communications holding company, and the active CEO of VaynerMedia, a full-service advertising agency servicing Fortune 100 clients across the company’s 4 locations.

 

Some example blog posts we discussed:

* How to tell a story in Social Media

* How to start a Podcast

* The Snap Generation: A Guide to Snapchat’s History

Keep in Touch with Gary Vee :

Gary Vaynerchuk’s Biography

Gary Vaynerchuk Quora 

Gary Vaynerchuk Facebook

Gary Vaynerchuk Instagram

Gary Vaynerchuk Medium

Gary Vee Youtube #AskGaryVee

Gary Vaynerchuk Linkedin 

Gary Vaynerchuk Books on Amazon.com

Gary Vaynerchuk Books on Amazon.in

In the late 90s, after identifying “the internet” as a land-grab opportunity, Gary transitioned his father’s local liquor store into one of the first wine e-commerce platforms resulting in growing the family business from $3-60MM in sales during a 5-year period.

During his time in the family business, Vaynerchuk also started one of the first long-form episodic video shows on YouTube in 2006 called WineLibraryTV, filming 1,000 episodes over a 5-year window. Gary’s wine knowledge, charisma, and uncanny ability to engage with his community landed him appearances on national television with Ellen Degeneres and Conan O’Brien, as well as establishing him as one of the most followed people on social media during its nascent years.

Not only did Gary leverage content creation and the rise of social media for his personal brand, but it was the seed which would become the pillar to his now 9-year old advertising agency VaynerMedia, servicing brands with an ever-expanding variety of offerings.

10 Things every Digital Marketer can learn from GaryVee:

* Being a practitioner in Digital and social media,

* Create time for your customers, potential customers, fans or followers,

* Being open and transparent, 

* Create and publish content, don’t wait for perfect timing.

Posts about content marketing these days focus on Instagram and visual communication, video marketing, influencer marketing, VR and AR, branded apps, and other current trends. One recent post, however, emphasized the importance of blog comments. Christine Perkett joined host Shel Holtz to talk about the role of blogs (and blog comments) in a content marketing strategy. Also in this week’s episode…

* Google employees delivered a petition to the CEO opposing a Defense Department contract. Now, some of those employees have quit

* Buzzfeed’s new podcast includes JoJo the bot

* A new algorithm can create “coherent” articles from multiple online sources to respond to search queries

* Conference speakers take a variety of approaches to marketing their sessions

* The Financial Times is getting huge traffic from its Instagram Stories

* Productivity is not the issue with employees using social media; the problem is retention

* Starbucks is keeping up a steady drumbeat of decisions to dampen coverage of activists criticizing the company

* GDPR goes into effect on Friday. Will you be ready?

* Dan York reports on GDPR, EFF’s final victory over a patent troll, and the upcoming WordCamp Europe

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.

About our guest

Christine Perkett founded PerkettPR in 1998 and SeeDepth, a PR analytics platform, in 2013. She has been named one of the ‘Top 25 Authorities Moving PR Forward’ in a recent industry study, and is routinely recognized as one of the most social media-savvy CEOs – currently ranked as one of the 100 Most Powerful Women on Twitter (by Hubspot), a “Top Influential Woman in Tech on Twitter” (by Google’s Don Dodge, alongside such greats as Marissa Mayer, WSJ’s Kara Swisher, Huffington Post’s Arianna Huffington, and others), and featured two consecutive years in BusinessWeek’s Social Media Special Report (keeping company of notable CEOs from Zappos, Virgin, Digg, HDNet, Mint and more). Christine was also awarded “Best Communications, IR or PR Executive” by the American Business Awards.

Links from this episode

* YouTube Hangout for H&H Report on May 26

* Google Employees Resign in Protest Against Pentagon Contract

* What do you get when you mix a podcast and a chatbot?

* BuzzFeed News’ podcast co-host, Jojo the bot, wants to help listeners follow along without friction

* Google’s New Algorithm Creates Original Articles From Your Content

* IABC World Conference Sessions

* How the Financial Times uses Instagram Stories as a traffic driver

* How To Harness The Power Of Blog Comments In Your Content Marketing Campaign

* Why 99% of Blogs Will Fail in 2018

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This week, Gini, Martin and Joe talk about:

* Counselors Academy’s annual spring conference in Toronto

* The demise of Klout. We won’t spill any tears.

* This is deadline week for General Data Protection Regulations. This may be a European law, but it can be applied to any Website that gathers data from Europeans. Be sure that you are in compliance with GDPR.

* There’s a lot of toxicity in social media discussions and comments. However, not everyone is giving up on the potential of social media to give voice to intelligent and constructive conversation. News this week of a project out of Simon Fraser University to to develop algorithms that would identify the most constructive, well-supported comments and raise their visibility.

* Martin has a new podcast course on LinkedIn.

* Gini Dietrich launches the Spin Sucks podcast

Should you be adding one or two spaces after a period in a paragraph? The forces aligned behind each approach have been vocal in their beliefs. One side got a boost from new research, but are we buying it? Listen to Shel and guest Terry Fallis discuss the controversy. Also in this week’s episode:

* Vine 2 is on hold indefinitely

* Klout is being consigned to the dust heap of social media history

* The Vitamin Shoppe has set up Instagram accounts for each of its 800 stores

* Carnival Cruise has (gasp!) responded well to a crisis

* Richard Edelman adds fuel to his argument that PR should be the new source of truth

* A study shows communicators continue to struggle with social visual communication

* There has been a lot of voice tech news, summarized for you in this episode

* Dan York looks at the imminent start of Europe’s General Data Protection Rules (GDPR), including WordPress 4.9.6 with GDPR compliance tools

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.

About our guest

Terry Fallis, A thirty-year veteran of the communications agency world, Terry co-founded Thornley Fallis in 1995 and co-created Inside PR, one of the first public relations podcasts, in April 2006. A two-time winner of the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, Terry is the award-winning author of six national bestsellers, including his latest novel, One Brother Shy, all published by McClelland & Stewart.

Links from this week’s episode

* Don’t hold your breath for Vine 2 — it’s on hold indefinitely, co-founder says

* Klout, the $200 million website that measured how important you are on social media with one number, is shutting down

* Why The Vitamin Shoppe is launching 800 Instagram accounts

* One space between each sentence, they said. Science just proved them wrong

* A Carnival Cruise Ship Flooded. It Went Viral on Facebook. The Company’s Response Was Brilliant

* Edelman: ‘Weakened Media Means A New Role For PR’

* Consumers demand more visual storytelling—how are communicators responding?

* AI is so important to Google it’s rebranding its research division

* Mobile First Index? Plan for Voice Search

* How brands can keep their identity while using Alexa’s voice

* Alexa’s Customizable Skills Make Echo More Fun

*

In the past two weeks, there has been a lot of discussion around Will Oremus’ article “Are You Really the Product? The history of a dangerous idea.” In a nutshell, Oremus argues that the “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product,” aphorism doesn’t really apply in the case of Facebook.

Gini and Joe have different perspectives on this. Gini sees a lot of value in Oremus’ arguments. Joe thinks that his arguments are beguiling, but convoluted, bringing us to the same conclusion: “If you aren’t paying for it with money, you are paying for it in other ways.” Ultimately, he who pays for something sets the terms.

AND

LinkedIn. Can it really be 15 years old? It seems like only yesterday we first met.

LinkedIn is not as big as Facebook. It doesn’t sit at the middle of the news cycle like Twitter. And it doesn’t have the love directed at Instagram. But it is older than all of these social networks – and it occupies a unique place for business. We talk about how it has changed over the years and our ongoing love/hate relationship with it.

Angela Sinickas joins host Shel Holtz to talk bout how a group of employees used a survey to get the CEO to pay attention to a problem in the culture when all else had failed. Also in this week’s episode:

* A survey of journalists, bloggers, and influencers finds everyone wishes PR people would get to the point

* The name of a restaurant with which Whole Foods had partnered led to a social media uproar

* U2 is releasing an Augmented Reality app to use at the band’s upcoming concerts

* Instagram users are getting fake comments and likes from real users

* Conde Nast is creating content channels for over-the-top devices including Roku, Apple TV, and Amazon Fire

* Older Americans are flocking to Facebook and it’s actually good for them

* Oscar Mayer is introducing a cryptocurrency called bacoin because of course they are

* Researchers wrote an algorithm that helps you figure out how much customers associate your brand with a concept and where you rank versus your competition

* Dan York’s tech report covers the impending launch of GDPR, Facebook’s F8 event, Stories surpassing feed-sharing, short video in China, NPR’s acquisition of podcast app PocketCast, and WordPress’s upcoming 15th birthday.

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.

About our guest

Angela Sinickas is the founder of Sinickas Communications, which has worked with companies, organizations and governments in 32 countries on six continents. Her clients include 25% of the Forbes Top 100 largest global companies. Before starting her own consulting firm, she held positions from editor to vice president in for-profit and government organizations, and worked as a senior consultant and practice leader at Hewitt and Mercer. She is author of a manual, How to Measure Your Communication Programs (now in its third edition),and chapters in several books. Her 50+ articles in professional journals can be found on her website,www.sinicom.com. Her work has been recognized with 20 international-level Gold Quill Awards from IABC, plus her firm was named IABC Boutique Agency of the Year in 2015. She holds a BS degree in Journalism from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an MS in Leadership from Northeastern University.

Links from this episode

* Study: Journalists Want PR Contacts To Cut To The Chase

* Outrage breaks out after Whole Foods partners with Yellow Fever eatery

* Women at Nike Fight Hostile Culture With a Simple But Effective Tool That You Can Use, Too

* Real People Are Turning Their Accounts Into Bots On Instagram — And Cashing In

* Conde Nast unveils OTT channels in penthouse presentation

* Older Americans’ Use of Facebook Up From 2011

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