Interviews

FIR Interviews

Friday, May 15, 2015

FIR Interview: Steven Green and Julian Mills on social intranets

FIR InterviewsCommunicators struggle to build genuine online engagement among employees using the various social tools available for intranets. Study after study shows that few employees use these tools, regardless of how much they might be engaged with external social media. At Bank of Montreal, though, Julian Mills overcame the obstacles to introduce social tools employees at all levels used to advance business goals. In this interview, FIR co-host Shel Holtz talks with Mills about the impetus for the introduction of social channels, and with TemboSocial CEO Steven Green, who worked with Mills to introduce the internal social media tools that drove the interaction on the Bank of Montreal intranet.

(Julian participated via mobile phone; the audio quality isn’t quite up to snuff, but it’s definitely listenable.)

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About our conversation partners:

Julian Mills, Bank of MontrealJulian Mills is a management and business development executive with a focus on social media utilization, workplace productivity and marketing innovation. In his role as Head, Corporate Intranet and Social Media at BMO Financial Group, Julian leads that team that maintains BMO’s intranets as well as manages portal renewal and the greater utilization of social business tools for 46,000 employees. Prior to joining BMO, Julian was Vice President of Client Development at Prescient Digital Media, where he worked with Fortune 500 Companies to improve their business performance using employee portals and social business technology.

Connect with Julian on Twitter at @millsj007

Steven Green, Tembo SocialSteven Green founded TemboSocial Inc. back in 1999 to provide a polling application for marketing and communications departments. Today, TemboSocial offers a suite of social tools that drives intranet platform adoption and employee engagement for the worlds leading brands. In today’s competitive staffing environment, companies desire to retain their talent and make employees smarter about company business by introducing core business processes related to collaboration, innovation and recognition. 

With an impressive roster of clients, such as Bank of Montreal, State Farm, Macy’s and The Cleveland Clinic, and with a reach of more than 1,000,000 employees every day, Steven continues to grow TemboSocial’s role in the modern workplace.

Steven has a BA from McGill University in Montreal and a Social Work degree from York University in Toronto.

Connect with Steven on Twitter at @TemboSocial

FIR Community on Google+Share your comments or questions about this podcast, or suggestions for future podcasts, in the online FIR Podcast Community on Google+.

You can also send us instant voicemail via SpeakPipe, right from the FIR website. Or, call the Comment Line at +1 415 895 2971 (North America), +44 20 3239 9082 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments. You can tweet us: @FIRpodcast. And you can email us at fircomments@gmail.com. If you wish, you can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

Check the FIR website for information about other FIR podcasts. To receive all podcasts in the FIR Podcast Network, subscribe to the “everything” RSS feed.

Posted by shel on 05/15 at 12:22 PM
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Tuesday, May 12, 2015

FIR Interview: Harry Hawk interviews Clammr co-founder Parviz Parvizi

ClammrIn a recent post to her blog, longtime FIR contributor Donna Papacosta shared her first Clammr recording after learning about the app at New Media Expo in Las Vegas. While at the Expo, Donna heard Mark Ramsay say, “People don’t share audio. They share conversations about audio.” Later, she met Parviz Parvizi, which claims to be “the Instagram of audio,” allowing users to share snippets of sound. “This would be a boon for podcasters seeking to build their audiences,” Donna wrote.

In this FIR interview, FIR contributor Harry Hawk (@hhawk) chats with Parvizi, Clammr’s co-founder.

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About our conversation partner:

Parviz ParviziParviz is co-founder of Clammr, a mobile app and platform making audio more social and discoverable. Users are calling Clammr, which features bite-sized audio clips of 18 seconds or less, the “Instagram of Audio.”

Previously, Parviz worked at McKinsey & Company, Goldman Sachs, the FCC, and O’Melveny & Myers. He has advised top 5 global media companies and mobile carriers on strategy and growth. He was a founder of McKinsey’s iConsumer research initiative on digital consumer behavior, authoring 3 of the Firm’s 10 most-downloaded media sector knowledge documents. Parviz holds a JD from Yale Law School and AB from Cornell.

Harry Hawk talks with Parviz the core features of Clammr and its creation, and then dives deep into the importance of audio discovery. Parviz discusses a wide range of use cases that would be beneficial to professional communicators. At its core a Clammr is a metadata rich audio file that is bite size, shareable, embeddable, linkable and curratable. Because Clammrs can be collected and curated 3 to 10 Clammrs can convey a rich tapestry of voices, sounds, and messages; each one can link back to a full source, a PDF file, Etc. Parviz also talks about the audio editing and creation tools which allows users of Clammr to create their Clammr files, mash up existing ones or overlay audio on top of or along size of an existing Clammr.

Connect with Parviz on LinkedIn.

Additional resources

FIR Community on Google+Share your comments or questions about this podcast, or suggestions for future podcasts, in the online FIR Podcast Community on Google+.

You can also send us instant voicemail via SpeakPipe, right from the FIR website. Or, call the Comment Line at +1 415 895 2971 (North America), +44 20 3239 9082 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments. You can tweet us: @FIRpodcast. And you can email us at fircomments@gmail.com. If you wish, you can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

Check the FIR website for information about other FIR podcasts. To receive all podcasts in the FIR Podcast Network, subscribe to the “everything” RSS feed.

Posted by shel on 05/12 at 08:29 AM
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Tuesday, April 07, 2015

FIR Interview: Harry Hawk talks with Facebook marketing expert Dennis Yu

While digital marketing dollars still flow into Facebook, marketers continue to express frustration at the social network, its reduced organic reach, and its ever-shifting algorithms. BlitzMetrics Chief Technology Officer Dennis Yu has a different perspective. A longtime Facebook marketing expert, Dennis believes good content can thrive organically on Facebook but that PR needs to adopt paid amplification of messages. He also makes the case that paid reach via Facebook should be seen as a gateway to using Google and other similar services (e.g., promoted tweets) to amplify messages, and that these buys should be aggregated for a more comprehensive analysis. They’re not traditional ads, however, and should not be viewed that way. They can, however, contribute to ROI and other success metrics.

In this FIR interview, FIR contributor Harry Hawk (@hhawk) delves into a variety of dimensions of Facebook marketing in a detailed conversation with Dennis.

Additional links from the episode:

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About our Conversation Partner

Dennis YuDennis Yu is the CTO of BlitzMetrics, which delivers Facebook analytics and content generation services. He is an internationally recognized lecturer in Facebook marketing, having been featured in The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, LA Times, National Public Radio, TechCrunch, Fox News, and CBS Evening News. He is also an author at Adweek’s SocialTimes column.

Dennis has held leadership positions at Yahoo! and American Airlines.  He studied Finance and Economics from Southern Methodist University and London School of Economics. Besides being a Facebook data and ad geek, you can find him eating chicken wings or playing Ultimate Frisbee in a city near you.

Connect with Dennis on Twitter at @dennisyu or on his blog.

FIR Community on Google+Share your comments or questions about this podcast, or suggestions for future podcasts, in the online FIR Podcast Community on Google+.

You can also send us instant voicemail via SpeakPipe, right from the FIR website. Or, call the Comment Line at +1 415 895 2971 (North America), +44 20 3239 9082 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments. You can tweet us: @FIRpodcast. And you can email us at fircomments@gmail.com. If you wish, you can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

Check the FIR website for information about other FIR podcasts. To receive all podcasts in the FIR Podcast Network, subscribe to the “everything” RSS feed.

Podsafe music - On A Podcast Instrumental Mix (MP3, 5Mb) by Cruisebox.

Posted by shel on 04/07 at 08:45 AM
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Tuesday, March 24, 2015

FIR Interview: Bryan Person interviews consultant, author, and speaker Jon Burkhart

FIR InterviewsLongtime FIR supporter Bryan Person caught up with social media consultant Jon Burkhart at the 2015 South by Southwest Interactive festival, where the pair talked about Burkhart’s focus on helping organizations avoid embarrassing themselves online.

At SxSW, Burkhart handed out postcards as icebreakers, each features an examble of a brand #fail on social media, including one dealing with the Justine Sacco kerfuffle, one addressing the ill-advised SpaghettiOs tweet commemorating Pearl Harbor Day, and one about the Golf Channel’s I Have a Golf Dream tweet on Martin Luther King, Jr.‘s birthday. He also has produced the Tits-up, Balls-up Challenge, a game he introduced to attendees at SxSW, pictured below, which he talks about in the interview.

Tits-up Balls-up Challenge

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About our Conversation Partner

Jon BurkhartJon Burkhart is a consultant, speaker, and author, baed in London. He is the co-author of Newsjacking, a 2013 book he wrote with Grant Hunter about how brands can be part of cultural conversations without looking like idiots (according to a Fast Co.Create review).

Jon started the first real-time marketing blog, UrgentGenius.com, in 2010 with his co-author, Grant Hunter. He sits on the South by Southwest Interactive Advisory Board; he has created or delivered seven talks at SxSW in four years. Burkhard leads “think-make-launch” workshops for agencies, brands, and organizations including British Design and Art Direction. He builds newsrooms in agencies to kick-start real-time content creation, and donates time to a cause he created called Millennial Mentoring, which launched at SxSW in 2013).

He spent 10 years in advertising agencies before moving into his current activities.

Connect with Jon on Twitter at @JonBurkhart

About our Guest Interviewer

Bryan PersonBryan Person’s role at Lithium Technologies is to help the community provider’s enterprise clients offer high-level customer care to their customers across the social web. Bryan delivers strategic counsel on best practices in social customer care and online engagement, and training/implementation on the company’s cloud-based Lithium Social Web platform.

He also leads presentations and panel discussions on social customer care at events and conferences, having spoken recently at SXSW Interactive, the WOMMA Summit, BlogWorld NYC & LA, and the Social Media Club Dallas.

Bryan is the founder of the Social Media Breakfast, an event-and-networking series for teaching, sharing, and learning about industry best practices. The breakfasts began in Boston in August 2007, and have since spread to more than 50 cities around the world.

Bryan’s specialties include customer service, social customer care, social CRM, professional speaking, content marketing, content creation, online communities, business blogging, corporate blogging, blogger outreach, podcasting, and corporate podcasting.

Connect with Bryan on Twitter at @BryanPerson

FIR Community on Google+Share your comments or questions about this podcast, or suggestions for future podcasts, in the online FIR Podcast Community on Google+.

You can also send us instant voicemail via SpeakPipe, right from the FIR website. Or, call the Comment Line at +1 415 895 2971 (North America), +44 20 3239 9082 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments. You can tweet us: @FIRpodcast. And you can email us at fircomments@gmail.com. If you wish, you can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

Check the FIR website for information about other FIR podcasts. To receive all podcasts in the FIR Podcast Network, subscribe to the “everything” RSS feed.

This FIR Interview is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years. Information: www.ragan.com.

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Posted by shel on 03/24 at 08:19 AM
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Thursday, February 19, 2015

FIR Interview: Red E App CEO Jonathan Erwin on employee communication trends and challenges

FIR InterviewsA special report on trends and challenges facing internal communicators drew on the observations of nine internal communications experts, including Peter Shankman, gini Dietrich, Susan Cellura, Steve Kaus, and FIR co-host Shel Holtz. In this FIR interview, The report—available for free from Red E App—a mobile tool that connects employees and organizations across a variety of dimensions—addresses eight distinct problems and six solutions.

In this FIR interview, Shel talks with Red E App co-founder and CEO Jonathan Erwin about the report—Internal Communications 2015—and some of its key findings.

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About our Conversation Partner

Jonathan ErwinJonathan is the co-founder and CEO of Red e App, an enterprise mobile platform that enables businesses to create a private or semi-private mobile network, allowing them to instantly communicate to the mobile device of their audience.

Jonathan has served in strategic sales, marketing and executive roles within the technology marketplace for over 20 years. His experience, coupled with his vision and dedication to service and thoughtful communication has led him to create, develop and bring the Red e App mobile platform to market.

You can reach Jonathan on Twitter at @JonathanCErwin.

FIR Community on Google+Share your comments or questions about this podcast, or suggestions for future podcasts, in the online FIR Podcast Community on Google+.

You can also send us instant voicemail via SpeakPipe, right from the FIR website. Or, call the Comment Line at +1 415 895 2971 (North America), +44 20 3239 9082 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments. You can tweet us: @FIRpodcast. And you can email us at fircomments@gmail.com. If you wish, you can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

Check the FIR website for information about other FIR podcasts. To receive all podcasts in the FIR Podcast Network, subscribe to the “everything” RSS feed.

This FIR Interview is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years. Information: www.ragan.com.

Podsafe music - On A Podcast Instrumental Mix (MP3, 5Mb) by Cruisebox.

Posted by shel on 02/19 at 05:09 PM
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Tuesday, February 03, 2015

FIR Interview: Steve Rubel on Storytelling in the Age of Social News Consumption

FIR InterviewsAmong the hundreds of thousands of news items distributed online every day, a precious few gain traction and spread across social networks (mostly Facebook, but even including “dark social” channels like messaging apps and email). Journalists are under increasing pressure to produce content people will share, and they are adopting practices they believe can increase the odds that their stories will lead to greater reach and more views. PR practitioners who understand these issues can tailor their outreach to editors and reporters who are being held accountable for the number of clicks their stories generate.

To better understand the characteristics of news that gets shared—and the techniques journalists are employing—Edelman partnered with two journalism-focused firms to study the issue. The 2015 Edelman Media Forecast, Storytelling in the Age of Social News Consumption, found (among other things) that more than 75% of journalists feel pressure to consider their story’s potential to get shared on social platforms, and to support thaat goal, they are infusing their stories with videos and images, brevity, localization, increased use of human voice, and a proximity to trending topics.

In this FIR interview, co-host Shel Holtz talks with longtime FIR friend Steve Rubel, Edelman’s Chief Content Strategist, about early results from the study and their implications for communicators.

Additional resources from this interview:

 

2015 Edelman Media Forecast from Edelman Insights

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About our Conversation Partner

Steve RubelSteve Rubel is an executive vice president and Chief Content Strategist for Edelman, the world’s largest independent public relations firm. In this role, Steve studies the future of media and works across the firm’s practices and geographies to help clients unify their communications strategies across traditional, emerging, owned, and social channels.

In addition, Steve acts as a highly visible Edelman thought leader and writer on media, technology and digital culture. He speaks dozens of times each year around the world and appears frequently in the press. In addition he actively shares his observations and insights through his blog, his monthly Advertising Age column and on Twitter where he is followed by more than 60,000.

Steve has been named to several prestigious lists, including: PR Week’s 40 Under 40 and The Forbes.com Web Celeb 25.

Prior to joining Edelman in 2006, Steve worked for 15 years in a variety of marketing communications positions in corporate, non-profit and small/mid-sized PR firms.

You can reach Steve on Twitter at @SteveRubel.

FIR Community on Google+Share your comments or questions about this podcast, or suggestions for future podcasts, in the online FIR Podcast Community on Google+.

You can also send us instant voicemail via SpeakPipe, right from the FIR website. Or, call the Comment Line at +1 415 895 2971 (North America), +44 20 3239 9082 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments. You can tweet us: @FIRpodcast. And you can email us at fircomments@gmail.com. If you wish, you can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

Check the FIR website for information about other FIR podcasts. To receive all podcasts in the FIR Podcast Network, subscribe to the “everything” RSS feed.

This FIR Interview is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years. Information: www.ragan.com.

Podsafe music - On A Podcast Instrumental Mix (MP3, 5Mb) by Cruisebox.

Posted by shel on 02/03 at 11:54 AM
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Friday, January 30, 2015

FIR Interview: Tom Webster on Edison Research’s Share of Ear study and the rise of podcasting

FIR InterviewsEdison Research is in the process of releasing data from its Fall 2014 Share of Ear study, which takes a panel approach to assessing how much time Americans spend listening to the many categories of audio. The data produced a number of surprises, not least of which is a surge in podcast listening—more than 27 million hours consumed each day. Further, podcast listeners consume more podcasts than any other kind of audio.

Edison Research VP joins FIR co-host Shel Holtz to discuss the data and the implications for podcasting.

Podcasting's Share of Ear

Additional links from the episode:

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About our Conversation Partner

Tom Webster, VP, Edison ResearchTom Webster is a specialist in consumer behavior who has spent some 20 years telling stories with numbers and trying to gain insights from data. He is Vice President of Strategy and Marketing for Edison Research. He is the principal author of a number of widely-cited studies in digital and social media, including The Social Habit, Twitter Users in America, and an annual series of studies and podcating. He is also the co-author of The Infinite Dial, the longest-running research series examining consumer usage of digital and traditional media in America.

Tom blogs at Brand Savant. You can connect with him on Twitter at @webby2001.

FIR Community on Google+Share your comments or questions about this podcast, or suggestions for future podcasts, in the online FIR Podcast Community on Google+.

You can also send us instant voicemail via SpeakPipe, right from the FIR website. Or, call the Comment Line at +1 415 895 2971 (North America), +44 20 3239 9082 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments. You can tweet us: @FIRpodcast. And you can email us at fircomments@gmail.com. If you wish, you can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

Check the FIR website for information about other FIR podcasts. To receive all podcasts in the FIR Podcast Network, subscribe to the “everything” RSS feed.

This FIR Interview is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years. Information: www.ragan.com.

Podsafe music - On A Podcast Instrumental Mix (MP3, 5Mb) by Cruisebox.

Posted by shel on 01/30 at 02:06 PM
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