FIR Podcast Network

A White House Press Corps that falls over themselves to distance themselves form a comic who spoke truth to power. The remarkable performance of Rudolph Giuliani and the rapid shift in the President’s tweets from “Rudy’s got it right” to “he has to get his facts right.” What is truth? Where is truth? And is the news media even less capable of providing us with the information we need as citizens. Or are they locked in a race to the bottom?

In the wake of these events, Gini Dietrich, Martin Waxman and Joseph Thornley revisit how we felt in the days after President Trump was elected. We struggled then, as we do now, to understand the new President, the people around him, and the effectiveness of news media outlets weakened by a deterioration in their business and distribution models.

So, after several weeks of reflecting on Facebook and social media, let’s take a step back and replay our conversation from Inside PR 464 about the new Trump administration and whether the news media is too weakened to do its job.

And as you listen to it, we think you’ll find that the questions we asked in January 2017 are as apt today as they were then.

“On the one hand, AI is perhaps the most revolutionary set of innovations since the transistor. But on the other, the bad press surrounding it continues to mount, perhaps even faster than the innovations themselves. And AI promises to change the role technology plays for every industry on this planet.” So writes Jason Bloomberg in a post on LinkedIn Pulse earlier this month. Paul and David sat down with him in our latest podcast to discuss some of the issues surrounding how to best publicize AI. Bloomberg has been a tech reporter for decades, writing for Forbes and various other B2B tech pubs over the course of his career.

Jason’s post makes four important points about PR and AI:

* AI vendors jump in with more hype than reality, what he calls AI-washing (after white-washing).

* AI has been on the verge of being the next big thing for decades now.

* AI will cost jobs. As if we didn’t have enough threats these days.

* Skynet. Need we say more?

We discuss some lessons that overall PR and marketing folks can learn from the rise and fall and current rise of AI, and how to set expectations accordingly for the Next New Thing.

We start off by exploring how to fight comment-trolling. While trolls have been around since before the dawn of the internet, it seems we have few ways to fight them and restore civility, or at least move towards some semblance of it. A story on Neiman Lab’s blog tell how as Norwegian site is “taking the edge off rant mode” by making readers pass a quiz before commenting. Their theory is that if readers actually read an article and prove that they understand the basic issues, their comments will be more meaningful. It is a nice start. (see screenshot here)

Then there is this new protocol from Google that harnesses machine learning techniques to help publishers thwart abusive comments online. Google has published an API and has a demonstration on its website that shows you how you can use it. Paul and David debate whether it is safe to turn on comments on your own blog, and recommend some kind of human oversight to keep things on point. Sadly, you still have to fight off the trolls for now.

Our next item comes from Shel, who pointed out a survey that shows 80% of B2B companies overlook customer renewal messaging. We don’t understand why this very important audience continues to be overlooked by marketers. There is this tidbit: 42% of respondents say their companies invest less than 10% of their marketing budgets on renewal messaging efforts. “Research shows the story you need to tell to protect existing customer relationships is actually the antithesis of the disruptive, attention-grabbing story you need to tell to acquire net new customers.” 

Finally, we examine the latest Fuqua/Duke Biz school CMO survey. It found that spending on marketing analytics is expected to leap from 4.6% to almost 22% of marketing budgets in the next three years. But marketers say barely a third of available data is used because managers lack the tools to measure the success of analytics and people who can link the data to marketing practice. We opine on why this is so and why social media continues to be stuck in a perennial “almost ready” status.   

This week Paul is crabby because of some bad PR experiences. He had an interview with one company that probably had seen “All the President’s Men” too many times and was confused about when something can go on background or off the record. Once something has been said, it is on the record. If you want to go on background, make sure you get that agreed to in advance. And don’t going calling on us after an interview and want to take something back. Not only is it bad form, but it just sours the entire relationship between press and PR.

Another all-too-common tactic is to send multiple follow up emails, “hope you had a nice weekend” (it is Wednesday, thank you very much) “and check back with you.” Really? Assume that if you don’t hear from us, it means we aren’t interested. Don’t badger the reporter. We understand that sometimes a PR person is getting heat from their client, but try not to transfer this energy and mess up the relationship between both clients and press.

In the news this week was the Amazon S3 outage on Tuesday. Paul got several emails with offers of sources to comment on the dire state of affairs of the Internet. (Didn’t you know? Neither did we.) This practice of what David Meerman Scott calls “newsjacking” is frequent, but try to do it properly: offer some unique perspective, just don’t trash Amazon or try to be too self-serving, and again, if your email doesn’t elicit a reply from the reporter, assume we aren’t interested. For example, Paul got an email from Commvault’s PR (arguably an Amazon competitor in the storage arena), which had some glimmer of hope, including some of the business and tech implications of the outage.

To round out our sourpuss series, we have this report from the DC-based policy think tank called the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. The study shows the tenor of tech reporting has become more pessimistic over the years, with a number of contributing factors such as more realistic understanding about the effects of tech, more sensationalist headlines, or just more people (including some news organizations) who want to use tech threats for their own particular purposes.

In a recent LinkedIn post, Kyle Cassidy proposed Why ‘Content Marketing’ Needs to be Killed Dead and Buried Deep. Cassidy is a former ad agency content marketer who has grown tired of the term and wants to see it retired. His well-written – and somewhat tongue-in-cheek – post gives some solid reasons why the term should be put out of its misery, including over-inclusive usage that renders it meaningless, not unlike the cutesy names that are now applied to departments that used to be called “personnel”and “marketing.” Given that our hosts both come from a long-standing journalism tradition in which the quality of our words was Job #1, he does have some salient points to consider.

Next, we pick up on the dust-up between Crowdstrike and NSSLabs over a test of the former’s endpoint security products. Crowdstrike claims NSS tests didn’t show its product in the best light and weren’t ‘authorized’ to review it. It’s even taken NSS to court. Our view: too bad. If you don’t like the results, shame on you for not working more closely with the testers. And double shame for suing them. David has been on the other end of this scenario for a number of years, and offers an inspiring anecdote about how a vendor can turn a pig’s ear into a silken test. Work with the testing press, and eventually you too can turn things around to benefit both of you.

Finally, we bring up the issue of a fake tweet being used by the New York Times and Newsmax in regards to the firing of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn earlier this week. The Times eventually posted a correction, but if the Grey Lady of journalism can be fooled, it brings up questions of how brands should work with parody or unauthorized social media accounts. Lisa Vaas has a great post on Naked Security that provides some solid suggestions on how to vet accounts in the future: Look for the blue verification check mark, examine when the account was created and review the history of tweets.

Paul and David this week discuss a few topics. First, the notion of automated phone attendants to provide outbound sales support is taking on new meaning when Paul’s got a call from Brian the fund-raiser. Turns out Brian wasn’t a real person, but it had Paul going for a couple of minutes with some very human-like interaction. We are reminded that some companies are making a solid business in this area, such as Conversica, which is bringing some interesting new artificial intelligence capabilities to sales support.

Next, perhaps it’s time to sharpen our use of language. Dictionary maker Merriam-Webster this week announced the addition of 1,000new words to its lexicon, including as NSFW and listicles.  Sadly, older words like these are still in use:

Innovative

Leading

Committed

Cost-effective

Next-generation

Flexible

Robust

High-performance.

What they all have in common is that they’re meaningless. These are the crutch words that marketers fall back upon when they don’t have facts in their favor. They often fill press releases and articles about innovative unique technologies (Hint!). Pundits have been advising against using these empty words for years, including David Meerman Scott with his Gobbledygook Index and Doc Searls with Buzzphraser. But bad habits die hard <*sigh*>.

David notes that the latest crop of domain name extensions is completely out of control. Given that the old standbys such as .com and .net are usually taken for the most common words, the Internet authorities now have dozens of new ones to choose from. For example, you now have domains that can end in .luxury, .bike, .clothing, .estate, .graphics and many, many more as shown in the screencap here from GoDaddy. However, this presents two issues: first, these newer extensions can be pricey, costing several hundreds of dollars per year for registration fees (and that is the retail price, not even considering what they could go for from brokers). Second, this makes it a lot harder for brands to know what to purchase, and it could up the ante if they are startups and have to purchase multiple names.

And speaking of domains this confusion has made it harder on security staffs to keep typo-squatted domains from infecting their networks. These are domains that look like the real domain, but are controlled by criminals or scammers. And the crooks are getting more clever: some now use Latin characters  to make the domains more believable. Needless to say, the legit owners of these domains have filed legal disputes, claiming that users would be confused and at peril, given that the typo domains are used to distribute malware.

Paul will tell you that all of this negative news is overwhelmed by the victory of his hometown Patriots in the Super Bowl. He still hasn’t come down from the ceiling.

Both Paul and David have known Sam Whitmore since all three were at PC Week (now eWeek) back in the go-go 1980s. Since 1998, Sam has been running his own consultancy for PR firms, called MediaSurvey. We spent some time talking to him about a fascinating series of posts on his site that began with an open letter that purported to be from a fictional agency to its fictional B2B client. The letter explains, from the agency’s point of view, why the relationship isn’t more productive. It inspired several comments, as well our own curiosity about Sam’s motivations.

The letter makes three points, with the basic thesis being that “We need max access and a budget bump,” meaning that PR budgets have to reflect a more approach to what agencies do. The fictional PR firm asks to be given better access to customer feedback and become a more strategic partner of the client’s marketing efforts, and to have better relationships with content gateways that will outlast a point product release. The tone of the letter is snarky, but also to the point, with good suggestions about the brave new world of what Sam calls “content platforms” such as ITCentralStation, ProductHunt, and SoftwareAdvice. Whitmore calls these the “IT version of Yelp,” and notes that they’re increasingly powerful in shaping buying decisions. Do you know about them? David actually contributes product reviews to the first site and has seen impressive results, but Paul had barely heard of them.

Sam’s letter suggests that traditional PR needs to be shaken up in the world of many influences. “Building influence is no longer an easily-delegated linear process of ideation, goal-setting and persuasion” he writes. “It’s now more of a matrix, as we help weave your agenda slowly and steadily across tier-one, trades and communities.” In this podcast, he tells what motivated him to write the open letter and how readers reacted. We also discuss the differences between working with large versus smaller/startup clients and how to develop expertise in new channels at your own PR shop.

This week we cover a grab bag of stories dealing with B2B marketing, some good and some bad. First, we mention David’s recent accolade for being one of the Best IT Blogs 2017: Must-Read Resources for CIOs, IT & Security Pros, coming in at #12. His ten-year -old but still vibrant blog can be found here.

Next, we talk about why Medium.com failed to deliver revenue, blaming this failure on its advertising model. The story ran in Bloomberg after the company had a significant recent layoff. Paul thinks that they didn’t really deliver much in the way of brand building, David thinks the site was too easy to use and thus hard to distinguish different voices and online properties as a result.

Next, Washington Post homepage editor Doris Truong was caught up in her own private PizzaGate fake news saga. Trolls on the Internet spread a terrible case of mistaken identity that was exacerbated by the speed at which false information spreads on social media. It all started with a Tweet that said: “Who is this woman and why is she secretly snapping photos of Rex Tillerson’s notes?” Turns out she wasn’t the person in the photo, and most of the shaming campaign happened while she was sleeping. A major factor was Sarah Palin’s reproachful retweet. Sadly, this is probably going to be a more frequent occurrence.

Our next piece goes into detail on understanding the kind of PR program you’re really looking for and how you need to set your expectations accordingly. The article mention five kinds of startup PR programs – the Project, the Test, the Taskmaster, the Partner and the Leader. More importantly, each type of program carries a relative success/failure. For companies that have never engaged a PR firm, this could be good advice — if they understand the metrics and outcomes of each program. 

Next, we cover this interesting story about building a brand, the Chinese way. Networking and communications giant Huawei (annual revenue of US$60 billion and the #3 smartphone vendor) paid a few dozen influencers to attend their September trade show in Shanghai and promote to their social media connections. They were also given full creative freedom to share their experiences however they wished. The company ended up getting 16,900 total engagements: 7.2k on Twitter, 6.4k on Instagram, 3.6k on Facebook for a total reach of 4.5 million people. This exposure was something the company would have spent about $129,000, quite a nice ROI. Their VP’s advice was to get started with a well-identified pool of influencers and invest the time and efforts on developing relationships with them, something we mention frequently in this podcast.

Finally, if anything goes wrong at tomorrow’s Presidential inauguration, it won’t be the first time. NPR had a delightful recap of inaugurations past this week, highlighting screw-ups and absurdities. Andrew Johnson gave his inauguration speech while drunk. Andrew Jackson threw open the doors of the White House for a big party and invited everyone. They’re still cleaning those stains from 1829 out of the carpets.

On Episode #122, Rich Klein was joined by Shel Holtz, Ruth Sherman and Greg Brooks as they analyzed the news conference held earlier in the day by President-Elect Donald J. Trump and had a larger discussion about the communication abilities of the incoming administration.

Brooks said that aside from Trump facing crises before taking office, that the media and the Democrats were also in crisis mode.

Holtz pointed out that President Obama has taken his message directly to the public and that the White House press corps often complained about access to the President, but that Trump had taken both to a new level.

Sherman noted that some of her business clients are concerned about Trump’s verbal attacks on business and the impact that may have on their own businesses and industries.

Klein expressed surprise that Vice President-Elect Pence and incoming Trump press secretary Sean Spicer opened Trump’s first news conference in six months by attacking news media outlets connected to the hacking crisis.

The group also touched on the confirmation hearings of some Trump nominees. Sherman said when it comes to speech communications, that “if the way you look and sound contradicts what you say, people will believe the way you look and sound instead of what you say. ”  She said, for example, that Attorney General nominee Jeff Sessions came across as likeable. Holtz noted that, similarly, Vice President-Elect came across as more presidential than former VP candidate Tim Kaine in their debate.

Klein asked the group about the communication skills of Trump’s key spokespeople. Brooks said that Kellyanne Conway is very good at her role of promoting Trump’s messages, particularly on the nightly news programs. He said the incoming Trump administration is still challenged in communicating policies and finding the right spokespeople (“policy wonks”) in those roles. Klein expressed concern that Conway said not to listen to what comes out of Trump’s mouth but to listen to what’s in his heart. He thinks that statement was a significant mistake that will come back to haunt her and the Administration.

But all agreed about her overall effectiveness in carrying Trump’s messages and Pence was also recognized as an able spokesperson on behalf of Trump.

 

According to an article by Barry Schwartz, published on Search Engine Land, future thinking points for the search marketing community in 2017 are: machine learning, AMP and structured data. This information was given out by Gary Illyes, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google.

If you’ve been in the digital marketing space and working on SEO for a while, you would most certainly know what structured data is and why Google and other search engines recommend we use it.

People understand the underlying meaning of your web content but search engines have a limited understanding. By providing additional cues with extra HTML tags, search engines and other applications better understand your content and display it in a useful, relevant way.

The 85th episode of Digital India Podcast on FIR Podcast Network is brought to you by staff and students of  Web Marketing Academy

 

Links :

* Google hangout with John Mueller

*  schema.org

* Search Engine Journal: Google’s Rich Cards Are Like Rich Snippets, in Card Form

* How to use Cards – Google documentation

* Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper

* Local business microdata generator

* Web code tools 

* structured data testing tool