FIR Podcast Network

Chris Christensen and Jen Phillips joined host Shel Holtz to discuss these topics:

* Most employees don’t know what makes their company different from the competition — and can’t explain it to customers

* U.S. travelers make 140 different website visits (on average) before booking a trip. Do you know your customers’ path before they make a decision on your product or service?

* Some companies have turned insults and attacks by the President-elect into badges of honor — and merchandise for sale.

* Getting people to share your content isn’t as big a deal as some marketers think. What does it take to amplify your content (and what should we be measuring)?

* Tech correspondent Dan York follows up on the Amazon Echo ecosystem and reports on China’s notice to app developers, Facebook’s fake news filter rolling out in Germany, a change to then notification on Facebook that a post has been edited,

* The panel also discusses the Amazon Alexa’s dominance at CES (while VR struggled to capture marketers’ attention)

* Jen found an Alexa-like product in development aimed at seniors

* A study found investors pay attention to company tweets, and there’s a difference between how the react to good and bad news

* The Washington Post has introduced a newsletter that summarizes reader comments. There’s a business model there for brands and agencies.

Connect with our panelists on Twitter at @chris2x and @jenzings.

Links to the source material for this episode are on Contentle.

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

FIR is usually recorded using Zencastr.

About today’s panel:

Chris Christensen is the CEO at BloggerBridge.com, a website that helps connect companies with relevant bloggers, writers, podcasters, videographers, and other content creators. He’s also the host of the Amateur Traveler Podcast, which he’s been producing almost as long as this show, since June 2005. Chris is also a coder; he was a director of Engineering for TripAdvisor, Executive VP of Engineering and Operations for LiveWorld, and a manager at Apple, designing and programming server solutions.

Jennifer Zingsheim Phillips is the principal at 4L Strategies, consulting and providing content development for a variety of industries. She has worked in communications and public affairs for 20 years. Her background includes work in electoral politics, government, lobbying, and public affairs PR work.

Gini Dietrich, Martin Waxman and Joseph Thornley talk about books that made a difference in their thinking and that they return to again and again. Books that we’d recommend to anyone building a communications business.

 

One of the really great and amazing things about YouTube is the free transcription or closed captioning system they have. It works remarkably well. It uses the same Google Cloud Speech API you can access through other services like Auphonic.com (details about Auphonic’s transcription features).

Warning:  If you are uploading video to YouTube you should probably check out what the automatic transcription service is serving up. Most of the time you will be happily surprised, but you may also be shocked when you learn it has a bit of a potty mouth.

Transcripts and closed captions are not identical, but are very similar. Within YouTube the automatic system produces closed captions. For use in show-notes, I prefer a format known as a Production Transcript. If you are uploading to YouTube you can use nearly any text based file that contains time codes and their system will sync the text to the video; you can also upload special CC formatted files such as WebVTT.

Google (via YouTube) now also offers to broker transcription and translation services. For a 1.5 minute video I uploaded for one of my students, (as part of the research for this episode) I paid YouTube $6 for a transcript from Tomedes – Smart Human Translations.es; other offers were priced at $10; there were several offers for me to pick from but they all had a three day turn-around.

In comparison I get a typical 72 hour turn-around from CLK Transcription, Inc., at a price more affordable then those offered by Google. However, it is nice that Google offers both transcription and translation services. CLK charges “$1.02 – $1.50 per minute for non-medical transcriptions.” In this case, the 1.5 min file transcribed by CLK cost $1.75 vs the $6 Tomedes charged.

I ordered the transcript from CLK at 8:32 Pm Sunday and I had the completed transcript 11 hours later. A turn around time that fast is not typical of larger jobs. Here is the file they produced. The file is in the production transcript format (e.g., it’s not a CC file), but when I have saved this format as a txt file and uploaded it to YouTube, YouTube’s in-take system has always done a great job of sync’ing it to my video.

The file from Tomedes was completed at 4:52 Pm or a turn around time of about 21 hours; faster than the promised three-day turn-around. However, it cost 3.4 times more, and took nearly 50% longer that CLK (my regular vendor). Tomedes did not send me a file; they directly installed the transcript as an English CC into my video (an added perk, but probably not worth the extra $5.25). If you view the video, you can see their work as the currently installed English closed captioning.

I was concerned during the process because while I ordered a transcription, their messaging to me referred to it as a translation. Their final message referred to it as English captions. The machine translation that I edited on the 15th (see below), was rendered “un-published” but wasn’t deleted.

Here are some edited screen shots of how I edited the automated transcription and ordered the $6 transcription from Tomedes.

I hope everyone has a great week! Bye Bye.

PS. the video I created for my class was made using Adobe Spark.

 

 

We keep the focus on fake news. Algorithms play a role in its spread. And algorithms can help to stop it. But that won’t happen if we don’t keep the pressure on social networks to optimize for things other than revenue.

As we approach the Presidential Inauguration, we’re taking a look back to Gini Dietrich and Martin Waxman‘s thoughts the day after the election. Now, more than ever, we need to be mindful of what is real and what is fake on both social and traditional media.

In this episode of Inside P2 (Public Participation), we talk about

* conferences that will give you insight into today’s best practices in P2,

* the IAP2, a professional association that will deliver professional development and networking opportunities, and

* the Journal of Deliberative Democracy, a source of scholarly research into P2.

I’d love to know what you think about the topics in this podcast, topics you’d like me to cover in future podcasts and people you’d like to hear from.

You can contact me in several ways

* Leave a comment at the bottom of this blog post.

* Tweet to @InsideP2Podcast

* Email [email protected]

Keep listening. Keep considering what you hear. Keep responding.

You won’t find many product marketers with advanced certifications in the technologies they market, but we found one. Our guest is Dena Bauckman, director of product marketing for email encryption provider Zix Corp. in Dallas. Dena has held similar titles at Sterling Commerce and BancTec, and got her start in IT marketing at HP, back in the days when that was a great place to work. Dena has worked at Zix for more than a decade, starting out in the product management area where she was motivated to get her CISSP security credential to help her better understand the underlying security technologies that are part of her products.

Not a typical career arc, and Bauckman’s perspective on the interplay between product marketers, corporate marketers and product managers is distinctive. She stresses how all parties need to understand where each other is coming from and be tuned in to their needs and schedules. For example, product managers are always worrying about what are the features that are going to be built into the next version. Which is great until the time comes to release and promote the current version.

We hear from Bauckman about why having technical savvy is an good asset in a marketing position, and how it helped her become a better communicator, especially with prospective customers. She also talks about what it is like to start a product marketing operation from scratch, even at an established company such as Zix.

In our last podcast, we spoke about the rise of fake news. Turns out we have more to say on the topic, which has ballooned across mainstream media in the past couple of weeks. Paul talks about building brand loyalty and trust from research that he did from an earlier book on social media influencers. David mentions this article in Teen Vogue of all places, where the reporter brings up the movie/play Gaslight and how our future president is using similar tactics to setup problems and then offer “solutions.” Gaslighting is just one aspect of fake news, and one issue is that reporters have to take the time to be skeptical and do more research to explore the “news” item and explain why it is false.

Also in this week’s episode we remark about a column that appeared in Sam Whitmore’s Media Survey: for a limited time you can read the article even if you aren’t a subscriber to Whitmore’s site. journalist Christina Farr (shown here) talks about how PR reps need to stop inserting themselves in the conversation when not requested or needed. “There are still (PR) agencies that would rather lose coverage than lose control,” she says. Those execs that she can directly communicate with get more ink. She also talks about the downsides of news embargoes, and we discuss how we respond when the drop date has to be pushed: then the item is fair game to be posted.

The 80th episode of Digital India Podcast on FIR Podcast Network is brought to you by staff and students of  Web Marketing Academy

There is no single perspective to define digital marketing and there is no single pathway for businesses to achieve their goals. Here is a random debate on where is Indian market in terms of digital marketing, how do they approach marketing and what businesses and agencies should focus on.

You can share your feedback at: [email protected]

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/webmarketingacademy

Host: Suresh

Guest : Sajeesh & Pranav

Podcast Manager & Podcast Editor: Bharani Dharan

Maris Callahan, Justin Goldsborough, and Tim Hayden join host Shel Holtz to talk about these topics:

* An update on the latest news about fake news, including a boycott of the new Star Wars movie, companies waking up to the threat, and data showing most Americans believe fake news headlines when they see them.

* PR is still saddled with a reputation as spin doctors, liars, and sharks circling startups in order to take a chunk of their flesh.

* As automated systems replace real people, what happens to the human-fueled customer experience?

* Do marketers need to move beyond branded content if they’re going to contribute to the company’s revenue stream?

* Corporate values used to be fairly mundane but today they can provoke partisan anger and blowback. “Pretty much every charitable donation, advertising dollar, and policy position has become a political statement with the potential to anger a sub-section of the company’s employee and customer base,” writes Paul Holmes.

* Advertiser excitement over Snapchat Live Stories is waning while Instagram Stories are producing massive swipe-throughs.

* One company has introduced a bot as an influencer while another is looking to a team of influencers with less klout than the big go-to celebrities. Is the shape of influencer marketing changing?

* In his Tech Report, Dan York looks at WordPress 4.7 and JetPack 4.4, as well as Telegram’s new “Telegraph” lightweight blogging service.

Connect with our panelists on Twitter at @MarisCallahan, @JGoldsborough, and @TheTimHayden.

Links to the source material for this episode are on Contentle.

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

About today’s panel:

Maris Callahan is director of Public Relations at Donuts Inc., the world’s largest registry of new gTLD’s (or as the folks at Donuts call them, “not-com” domain name endings). With over 10 years of experience in public relations on the agency side and as an independent consultant, Maris is responsible for the planning and execution of Donuts’ B2C and B2B public relations strategy. Before Donuts, she was an independent consultant to small and mid-size businesses seeking brand awareness. She also worked for some of the top PR agencies in the world, including Edelman, Burson-Marsteller and Lippe Taylor. Maris is also the creator and writer of In Good Taste, a food and lifestyle blog founded in 2008.

Justin Goldsborough is a senior vice president and social media lead at FleishmanHillard Kansas City and is a member of the agency’s Social Innovation Leadership Team. During his 7.5 years at FH, he’s led communications strategy for clients such as Sleep Number, Hallmark Cards and Children’s Mercy Hospital. Before coming to FH, Justin was at Sprint for two years where he managed the company’s employee social network, Sprint Space, and led efforts to improve customer outreach via social media, specifically Twitter. Justin also spent some time in the food biz when he managed employee communications, including the company Intranet and initial social media efforts, for Applebee’s International. Justin is a past president of Kansas City IABC, where he led his local chapter to the highest honor IABC bestows – International Chapter of the Year. Justin is also a diehard Kansas City Royals fan and is much more eager to talk baseball these days than he was from 1986-2013.

Tim Hayden has two decades of experience in leading high-growth technology firms and marketing agencies. Before Brain+Trust, he was head of marketing at Zignal Labs,