Sunday, April 08, 2012
FIR tweetup in Amsterdam
This week, FIR co-hosts Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz (pictured l-r) will be in Amsterdam taking part in The 2012 International Social Media and PR Summit, organized by Ragan Communications, on April 11 and 12, 2012.
It will be the first time that Shel and Neville have physically met up since 2009 - as you know, FIR is done remotely each week via Skype - when Neville was in California for that year’s IABC conference. We thought it would be great to get together with FIR listeners who also might fancy a beer and a chat.
We’re meeting in the bar of the Crowne Plaza Amsterdam South hotel on Tuesday April 10 - the evening before the conference starts - at 8pm CET.
Let us know if you’re coming - RSVP at the FIR Tweetup page on TwtVite. If you’d like to tweet about the tweetup too, great, please add the hashtag: #firtweetup.
We’d love to see you in Amsterdam this week, either at the FIR tweetup or at the conference!
Thursday, April 05, 2012
FIR Interview: Sprint’s Sara Folkerts
If you tweet a problem or complaint about your Sprint mobile service or device, you’re likely to hear back pretty quickly from a Sprint Ninja, an employee volunteer who will work to resolve your issue. While some Ninjas engage in this kind of customer support, others are brand evangelists. They all undergo training, and the effort has resulted in a measurably improved reputation for Sprint.
In this FIR Interview, FIR co-host Shel Holtz speaks with Sara Folkerts, who works in internal social media at Sprint and is heavily involved in the Ninja program. She discusses the origins of the Ninjas, what they do, how they’re trained, the results it has achieved, and where the program is heading.
Get this podcast:
- Download the MP3 file (11.4Mb, 28:29)
- Get the show on iTunes
- Subscribe to the FIR Interviews RSS feed
- Get the FIR app for your iPhone and for your Android device (visit the Android Market from your device)
About our Conversation Partner
Sara is passionate about sharing, communicating, transparency and being open-minded. This has led her to her current job as a community manager and social media evangelist at Sprint. In addition to her role as community manager, Sara leads the Ninjas program at Sprint. The Sprint Social Media Ninjas is a group of empowered employees who want to connect with customers and spread the “gospel” of Sprint in social media. Sara has presented on internal social media strategies at several conferences and at other companies. Where can you find her? On Twitter, of course! @saramiller.
Share your comments or questions about this podcast, or suggestions for future interviews, in the FIR FriendFeed Room. You can also email us at fircomments@gmail.com; call the Comment Line at +1 253 780 9125 (North America), +44 20 3239 9082 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments; comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.
To receive all For Immediate Release podcasts including the weekly Hobson & Holtz Report, subscribe to the full 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.
Monday, April 02, 2012
The Hobson & Holtz Report - Podcast #645: April 2, 2012
Content summary: Neville and Shel are both traveling, but Shel’s solo this week with a contribution from Neville; two new interviews are up, one with Dachis Group CTO Erik Huddleston and the other with PulsePoint Group’s Michael Gale and Jacklyn Allgayer about the new study, “The Socially Engaged Enterprise;” another interview is coming later this week with Sara Folkerts of Sprint on the mobile company’s program to train employees to represent the organization in social channels; a new blog worth looking at is PR Examples; Shel’s meeting with PRSA’s Keith Trivitt in New York; News That Fits: as access to information increases, trust is declining, yet CEOs who tweet are trusted more; Ragan promo; Michael Netzley’s Asia Report, including a look at the Melbourne Mandate from the Institute for Public Relations; are communicators ready to begin producing mobile content?; Media Monitoring Minute from CustomScoop; Facebook is reportedly preparing a major upgrade of its search utility to produce robust social search; Dan York’s report; TemboSocial promo; games and gamification make inroads as the U.S. State Department sponsors a crowdsourcing game to identify five (fake) criminals around the world; music from The Fire Apes; and more.
Get FIR:
- Download the MP3 file (24.43Mb, 60:55)
- Subscribe to the RSS feed
- Get the show at iTunes
- Get the FIR app for your iPhone and for your Android device (visit the Android Market from your device)
Messages from our sponsors: FIR is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years, www.ragan.com; Save time with the CustomScoop online clipping service: sign up for your free two-week trial, at www.customscoop.com/fir; and TemboSocial (formerly Pollstream): helping you transform your communications goals into exciting strategies that will enable you to engage, educate and inform your customers and employees online, pollstream.com/fir/.
For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report for April 2, 2012: A 61-minute podcast recorded live from Concord, California.
Links to websites, blog posts and other content we discuss in the show are posted as Delicious bookmarks to facilitate your connection with the discussions and sharing of that content.
Names of blogs, individuals, companies and organizations we discussed or mentioned in the show are posted to the FIR Show Notes pages at The New PR Wiki. You can contribute time stamps – see the show notes home page for info.
Share your comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for future shows, in the FIR FriendFeed Room. You can also email us at fircomments@gmail.com; call the Comment Line at +1 253 780 9125 (North America), +44 20 3239 9082 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments; comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.
To stay informed about occasional FIR events (eg, FIR Live), sign up for FIR Update email news.
So, until Monday April 9…
Saturday, March 31, 2012
FIR Interview: Michael Gale and Jacklyn Allgayer of The PulsePoint Group
Companies that fully embrace social engagement are experiencing four times greater business impact than less-engaged companies, according to a new study conducted by PulsePoint Group, an Austin, Texas and Los Angeles,California-based management and digital consulting firm.
The study, conducted in collaboration with The Economist Intelligence Unit, involved interviews with hundreds of CEOs. The results led to the identification of six types of socially engaged enterprises and offers insights for organizations that want to assess their own social engagement against their peers. According to the study, “The Economics of the Socially engaged Enterprise,” most socially engaged companies are led by CEOs and other leaders who advocate for culture change in order to support deeper levels of engagement. Listening centers and influencer engagement are now the price of admission for the most advanced companies, according to the study, which revealed economic and business values for engagement across 10 distinctive social engagement activities.
Pulsepoint has released a slide deck and an executive summary of the study, and plans to release more details at a webinar set for April 19 (registration details).
In this FIR Interview, PulsePoint partner Michael Gale and associate Jacklyn Allgayer discuss the findings of the study with FIR co-host Shel Holtz.
Get this podcast:
- Download the MP3 file (10:4Mb, 26:05)
- Get the show on iTunes
- Subscribe to the FIR Interviews RSS feed
- Get the FIR app for your iPhone and for your Android device (visit the Android Market from your device)
About our Conversation Partner
Michael Gale is a partner at PulsePoint Group. He is a recognized industry expert in integrated technology marketing, having founded Strategic Oxygen in 2001, which is widely regarded as one of the technology industry’s primary data toolsets for marketers. He has worked directly on over 500 global programs and campaigns for major technology brands for over the last decade and sees the migration of integrated needs to the digital and social landscape as one of the major challenges and opportunities for the next generation of CMOs tasked with taking social beyond a low cost reach alternative. He is part of PulsePoint Group’s team building the social engagement architecture for a range of B2B and B2C industries that range from pharma to high net tech companies. Michael Gale is co-author of “The Economics of the Socially Engaged Enterprise” and continues to lead innovative research initiatives at PulsePoint Group.
Connect with Michael on Twitter at @MichaelGale.
Jacklyn Allgayer is an associate at PulsePoint Group where she specializes in social engagement analytics. This includes examining online conversations and determining stakeholder perceptions around some of the world’s most influential businesses and institutions. The insights gained from these analyses inform key recommendations for developing or improving social engagement strategies. Since joining PulsePoint Group, Jacklyn has worked with numerous Fortune 500 companies including Delta, Dell, and GE among several higher education institutions to develop and manage social media and reputation management programs that include influencer engagement, digital monitoring and response, content strategy development, issues management and social stakeholder engagement. Jacklyn continues to conduct key research that validates the conclusions reached in “The Economics of the Socially Engaged Enterprise.”
Connect with Jacklyn on Twitter at @JacklynAllgayer.
Share your comments or questions about this podcast, or suggestions for future interviews, in the FIR FriendFeed Room. You can also email us at fircomments@gmail.com; call the Comment Line at +1 253 780 9125 (North America), +44 20 3239 9082 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments; comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.
To receive all For Immediate Release podcasts including the weekly Hobson & Holtz Report, subscribe to the full 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.
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
FIR Interview: Erik Huddleston, CTO of Dachis Group
Austin, Texas-based Dachis Group defines itself as an organization that "powers the design, development, management and measurement of social business solutions for the world’s leading companies."
To this end, among the products and services the company offers is the Social Business Index, a tool that, they say, sucks in data from over 100 million social accounts for more than 30,000 brands every 15 minutes to build a real-time picture of the success of brands and companies in their social engagement work.
While social media monitoring helps companies listen to conversations they are not part of, Dachis says the index is about assessing the outcome of conversations initiated by those companies.
In this FIR Interview carried out in Dachis’ London office, Erik Huddleston, the company’s Chief Technology Officer, explains to FIR co-host Neville Hobson how this and other Dachis offerings help global companies like IBM, Estee Lauder, Telstra, Samsung, Dell, Levi’s, Target, Coca-Cola, Red Bull, Cisco and others uncover insights, take action on those insights and measure the performance and ROI of those actions.
Get this podcast:
- Download the MP3 file (15.7Mb, 34:15)
- Get the show on iTunes
- Subscribe to the FIR Interviews RSS feed
- Get the FIR app for your iPhone and for your Android device (visit the Android Market from your device)
About our Conversation Partner
Erik Huddleston is the Chief Technology Officer at Dachis Group. He leads the go to market and product delivery for Dachis Group’s groundbreaking Social Business Intelligence as a Service (SBIaaS) platform, SaaS applications, and managed services. Erik is passionate about the transformational potential of social and big data for the world’s largest companies.
Erik came to Dachis Group from Inovis, where he served as Chief Technology Officer and drove the vision, development, and evangelism for their cloud integration, analytics, and social supply chain offering. Erik joined Inovis through the acquisition of BetweenMarkets, the leading provider of partner performance management applications, where he served as founder and CTO. While at BetweenMarkets, Erik drove an agile product and development organization and helped dozens of the world’s leading companies solve their Business Community Management challenges.
Prior to founding BetweenMarkets in 2000, Erik architected consumer and retail analytics products at two enterprise software startups: eCustomers, a retail merchandising software provider; and SMART Technologies, an ecommerce and consumer personalization software provider acquired by i2 Technologies.
Connect with Erik on Twitter: @ehuddleston.
Share your comments or questions about this podcast, or suggestions for future interviews, in the FIR FriendFeed Room. You can also email us at fircomments@gmail.com; call the Comment Line at +1 253 780 9125 (North America), +44 20 3239 9082 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments; comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.
To receive all For Immediate Release podcasts including the weekly Hobson & Holtz Report, subscribe to the full 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.
Monday, March 26, 2012
The Hobson & Holtz Report - Podcast #644: March 26, 2012
Content summary: Shel’s travelling, Neville solo recording this week; FIR Interview with PRSA’s Gerard Corbett posted; FIR Book Review of For Immediate Release (no kidding) by Ronn Torossian posted; RSS feed problems with the last episode fixed; News That Fits: blogs on the rise; Ragan promo; Neville and Dan York in conversation: what Dan’s doing this week in Paris with the IETF, the whole Facebook password privacy kerfuffle, and more; the Media Monitoring Minute with CustomScoop; listener comments on Pinterest’s revised terms of use, and more; New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg says social media can hurt governing; Michael Netzley reports from Singapore on topical communication issues in Asia; TemboSocial promo; who do you think "owns" social?; discount for FIR listeners going to The Social Customer conference in London; news about next week’s show; Shel and Neville are at the 2012 International Social Media and PR Summit in Amsterdam on April 11-12; music from Sunspot; and more.
Get FIR:
- Download the MP3 file (35.3Mb, 77:09)
- Subscribe to the RSS feed
- Get the show at iTunes
- Get the FIR app for your iPhone and for your Android device (visit the Android Market from your device)
Messages from our sponsors: FIR is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years, www.ragan.com; Save time with the CustomScoop online clipping service: sign up for your free two-week trial, at www.customscoop.com/fir; and TemboSocial (formerly Pollstream): helping you transform your communications goals into exciting strategies that will enable you to engage, educate and inform your customers and employees online, pollstream.com/fir/.
For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report for March 26, 2012: A 77-minute podcast recorded live from Wokingham, Berkshire, England.
Links to websites, blog posts and other content we discuss in the show are posted as Delicious bookmarks to facilitate your connection with the discussions and sharing of that content.
Names of blogs, individuals, companies and organizations we discussed or mentioned in the show are posted to the FIR Show Notes pages at The New PR Wiki. You can contribute time stamps – see the show notes home page for info.
Share your comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for future shows, in the FIR FriendFeed Room. You can also email us at fircomments@gmail.com; call the Comment Line at +1 253 780 9125 (North America), +44 20 3239 9082 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments; comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.
To stay informed about occasional FIR events (eg, FIR Live), sign up for FIR Update email news.
So, until Monday April 2…
Friday, March 23, 2012
FIR Interview: PRSA Chairman and CEO Gerard Corbett on the Senate inquiry into PR spending
FIR co-host Shel Holtz interviews Gerard Corbett, Chairman and CEO of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) about the association’s advocacy effort that was launched after the announcement that a U.S. Senate committee would investigate government spending on public relations.
Additional resources:
- Roll Call article about the investigation: “Senators Will Investigate How Tax Money Is Used for Administration Spin”
- Gerry Corbett’s opinion piece published in Roll Call
- PRSA President William Murray’s opinion piece published on the blog of the Institute of Public Relations
Get this podcast:
- Download the MP3 file (9.31Mb, 23:11)
- Get the show on iTunes
- Subscribe to the FIR Interviews RSS feed
- Get the FIR app for your iPhone and for your Android device (visit the Android Market from your device)
About our Conversation Partner
Gerry Corbett is Chair and CEO of strategic communications consulting firm Redphlag LLC and Chair and CEO of the 32,000 member Public Relations Society of America.
Gerry is an experienced and versatile branding, marketing, public relations and communications executive and coach having served four decades in senior marketing and communications roles at Global Fortune 100 firms and earlier in his career in aerospace engineering and information technology with Silicon Valley firms and NASA. He has effectively and deftly managed a range of communications, marketing and customer service functions in order to advance corporate culture, enhance brand understanding and trust, and enable organization harmony and effectiveness.
Connect with Gerard on Twitter: @gerardcorbett.
Share your comments or questions about this podcast, or suggestions for future interviews, in the FIR FriendFeed Room. You can also email us at fircomments@gmail.com; call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America), +44 20 3239 9082 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments; comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.
To receive all For Immediate Release podcasts including the weekly Hobson & Holtz Report, subscribe to the full 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.
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