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This week’s conversations feature Peter Himler on companies using founders and entrepreneurs as spokespersons, Donna Papacosta on the Oxford Comma, and David Spark on a study on business video consumption habits. Other stories include…
- Google has introduced its own version of Stories
- You can still buy a newspaper from a newspaper rack
- Twitter’s new feature streams local news video from the scene of breaking news
- Facebook is creating a section in Watch to feature breaking news
- Comments on Twitter or YouTube could get you banned from Twitch
- Facebook is making it easier for businesses to help during a crisis
- Deloitte is out with its mobile consumer survey and we’re all using smartphones for pretty much everything
- Replying to customer reviews improves your overall ratings
- Unilver is tackling the social media swamp with threats and blockchain
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 this week’s guests
Peter Himler formed Flatiron Communications LLC in 2005 after leading the media relations teams at Edelman, and WPP’s Burson-Marsteller, Cohn & Wolfe and Hill and Knowlton. He left the big agency world to help emerging and established companies and organizations better capitalize on the latest communications technologies and digital/social media strategies. In addition to running Flatiron, Peter has written since 2011 for Forbes.com on the intersection of media, technology and marketing. He also founded and edits the “Adventures in Consumer Technology” publication for Medium.com, which has 36,000 followers. He is solidly engaged in the social graph mostly with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, RebelMouse and LinkedIn as his favored channels. Peter serves as president of the Publicity Club of New York, is active with the New York Tech Meetup, and sits on the executive board of the Communications and Media Studies Program at Tufts University.
Donna Papacosta, principal of Toronto-based Trafalgar Communications, is a writer, speaker, podcaster and consultant, helping clients communicate better with employees, customers and prospects. In 2005 Donna started producing the Trafcom News Podcast, one of the first business podcasts in Canada. She is author of The Podcast Scripting Book and co-author of The Business of Podcasting. In addition to communications and podcast consulting, Donna leads workshops on social media topics, and teaches Digital Communications Strategy/Social Media at the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies. An active member of the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC), Donna is a dual U.S.-Canadian citizen, and holds a Masters degree in Public Administration from New York University and a Certificate in Magazine Journalism from Ryerson University.
David Spark is a veteran tech journalist and founder the brand journalism firm Spark Media Solutions. Spark has worked with brands such as IBM, Microsoft, HP, and Indycar Racing. He’s reported on the tech scene for more than 18 years in more than 40 media outlets, and is the author of “THREE FEET FROM SEVEN FIGURES: One-on-One Engagement Techniques to Qualify More Leads at Trade Shows” available at ThreeFeetBook.com.
Links from this week’s episode:
- AMP Stories: The new Accelerated Mobile Pages format from Google
- The future of newspapers (and the $100 I’m going to take from Jose Leal)
- Forget the Spokesmodel—Companies Want Real People
- NYT print edition to last another 10 years at least
- Twitter’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Live Stream Was Part Of A New Initiative
- Facebook is creating a news section in Watch to feature breaking news
- Comments on Twitter can lead to punishment on Twitch
- Making it Easier for Organizations and Businesses to Help People During a Crisis
- A lack of an Oxford comma cost dairy $5 million
- Global mobile consumer survey
- Replying to customer reviews boosts ratings
- New report examines content consumption trends for business video
- Unilever to Facebook and Google: Clean up ‘swamp’ or we’ll pull ads
- Facebook pledges to meet advertiser demands after Unilever criticism
- ‘Who wouldn’t agree with that?’: PR pros on Unilever’s threat to pull ads from social media
- Unilever Unveils Blockchain, Threatens Billions In Ad Spend
Links from Dan York’s Report:
- Talking to Your Clients About the WordPress Gutenberg Editor
- What’s new in Gutenberg (16th February)
- HTTPS or bust: Chrome’s plan to label sites as “Not Secure”
- 2 New Tools from Vimeo Help Businesses Share Content with More Viewers
- Twitter discontinues its Mac desktop app after years of spotty support
- Twitter Now Says Rules About Journalists Being Impersonated In Tweets Need To Be Revised
- How white nationalists fooled the media about Florida shooter
I couldn’t leave you without comments for another week, so I’ll start by asking whether the new podcast format is really less time-consuming for you to create. Or rather, since at least you don’t have to do so much scheduling, whether it takes longer to produce one of these new episodes or to record a Hobson & Holtz report with Neville. I’m enjoying the new format, but it seems to me that it would actually be pretty involved to put it all together.
Chip Griffin’s Media Intelligence Minute reminded me that I had recently heard something on a podcast about moving towards using JSON feeds instead of RSS feeds, particularly for podcasting. RSS feeds are XML files, and they tend to be bulky. A podcast feed can be very large even without its enclosures, and this tends to cause problems for podcatchers. This interested me in part because the WordPress REST API already uses JSON. I’m no JSON expert, but I can read it easily, which is more than I can say of a raw RSS feed.
I did a little reading about JSON feeds today and found that there are a few feed producers and some podcatcher apps that are starting to support them, though the developer of the Blubrry PowerPress plugin we use on this site expressed some significant concerns in May 2017.
I suspect that if I try to add too many links in a comment, it will get flagged as spam, so I’ll just share the link to the main JSON Feed website: https://jsonfeed.org/. That explains the reasoning behind JSON feeds, the process of mapping RSS to JSON, and includes links to more information.
Hi Shel (and hello Neville),
Greetings from Seattle. After listening to this week’s episode, I couldn’t leave you without a comment this week.
I continue to be amazed how you balance your work and personal life with producing the show, which is and always has been, a must listen for anyone interested in the future of communications. Thank you.
As someone who is fighting a rear guard action against the death of the adverb in America, I enjoyed the discussion on the oxford comma, and for anyone with a love of the English language, I highly recommend Lynne Truss’s book Eats, Shoots & Leaves. It was published back in 2003 but it’s still an entertaining great read.
I’m looking forward to this week’s Hobson & Holtz report.
Thanks for all the work Shel, we do appreciate it, and I’m sure your loyal listeners will endeavor to be more responsive!
Tom