Here's a real treat for loyal readers: a heated, 20-minute free-for-all discussion about happy employees. The question: Are they more or less productive? A recent survey from Leadership IQ suggests the latter. And, I agree!

Happy vs Productivity podcast

Download the link and listen as I positively skewer Michael Dresner, CEO of Brand² Squared Licensing, the strategic licensing division at Peppercom

Michael believes happiness is more important than productivity. And, as you'll hear, his loyal employees, Dame Heather Rosenthal and the Baroness Alana Schnee, agree (yet, neither seem very happy. JK, ladies. JK).

My co-host, Deb 'Kangoo' Brown joins in the fray as do a few other Peppercom employees who are neither happy nor productive (again, JK guys. JK).

Anyway, see what you think. Am I right in believing that toxic cultures such as those at Goldman Sachs and Yahoo are just as successful as the warm and fuzzy ones found at Zappos and G.S. Schwartz? And, that making everyone happy at the expense of accountability and productivity is a one-way ticket to Palookaville?

I'd love to hear your thoughts. Enjoy!

PR Daily – May 16, 2012

This article discusses JPMorgan Chase’s recent $2 billion trading loss as one of the worst PR disasters of the year due to the company’s bad public reputation, CEO’s proclaimed crisis management expertise, and overall public distrust in financial services. Do you think this crisis will top the charts amidst others from this year, including the Susan G. Komen, Pink slime, Walmart bribery, Goldman Sachs resignation letter, and Homeless Hotspots at SXSW crises?

GM Hands Facebook a PR Challenge

PR News – May 16, 2012

This article explains General Motor’s recent decision to drop Facebook from its digital advertising budget. GM will continue to use free Facebook pages to promote its products, but the company does not believe buying ads on the social network is effective in converting users to customers.

How to land a PR job abroad

PR Daily – May 16, 2012

In the midst of a down job market, this article discusses an area of optimism for recent graduates: working abroad. It gives helpful tips to find a PR job outside of the U.S., including making connections early, doing your homework and maintaining a positive mindset.

Consumers: Social Dialogue Not Really Two-Way Affair

PR News – May 15, 2012

This article explores a study that shows how consumers expect a two-way dialogue with brands across the social Web, but rarely get it. A survey conducted by Lithium Technologies, reveals that while 25 percent of respondents expect to hear back from a company when they tweet about a brand or product, only 9 percent have actually received a response.

Seven Principles of Content Marketing

PR Squared – May 14, 2012

In this article, the concept that “Content is King” makes a comeback. It lists seven easy-to-follow tenets surrounding the popular use of content marketing and discusses PR rules of thumb such as posting share-worthy and SEO beneficial content, making use of earned media and writing digestible pieces of content.

Erin Feldman is the marketing communications manager at TouchSystems, a touch screen company based in Hutto, Texas. Her background is in marketing and creative writing, and she riffs about writing right at her blog, Write Right (so write right, don’t make her use her red pen). She spends the rest of her time writing poetry, drawing, reading, and running.

Toon Time: IPO Madness

If you listen to podcasts, Player.fm might interest you if you want an easy way to both listen to your favourite shows and discover new ones.

Player.fm is a podcasting service in the cloud. You use it in your web browser – there are no apps to install, just an easy-to-use method to create a free account called a channel, add the RSS feed addresses of podcasts to your channel, save, and listen. You can also add iTunes feeds as well as import an OPML file you already have.

I’ve been podcasting for over seven years and listen to a lot of other podcasts. Typically, I subscribe to them and get the audio files usually from iTunes via an RSS reader. The old fashioned way! It’s cumbersome and often imperfect, though, and probably one reason why I don’t listen as much or as often as I’d like to.

What Player.fm offers is streaming audio on demand. It really is easy to set up and use as I discovered today. The screenshot above shows part of the channel I created that includes 14 business/communications podcasts that I listen to often:

1. For Immediate Release (the podcast series I co-host with Shel Holtz)
2. IABC Cafe2Go
3. Inside PR
4. Jaffe Juice
5. Jay Baer’s Social Pros Podcast
6. Marketing Edge from Provident Partners
7. Marketing Over Coffee
8. Media Bullseye
9. On the Record…Online
10. PR And Other Deadly Sins
11. PRSA Voices of Public Relations
12. Six Pixels of Separation
13. Steve Lubetkin’s Professional Podcasts
14. Trafcom News Podcast

(For information on each one, see “16 business podcasts worth listening to” that I wrote in March. And in case you’re wondering why this post lists only 14, it’s because 2 on the original list haven’t been updated this year, 1 is behind a subscriber paywall, and I’ve included FIR.)

If you want to enjoy seamless listening, without any fuss, then go to http://player.fm/jangles, my Player.fm channel, and click on the big ‘play’ button with each podcast. Or, if you prefer to subscribe, here are three handy options:

• OPML file that you can  import into any other podcatcher including Google Reader
• RSS feed aggregating the latest episodes of all 14 podcasts
• iTunes link

As Player.fm developer Michael Mahemoff says in the FAQ:

Why play podcasts on a website?
Podcasts were originally designed to be downloaded, and that’s still worthwhile. But most podcast apps these days, including iTunes, provide the ability to stream content on demand. The nice thing about this is you can try a podcast a few times before subscribing to it. Player FM takes this a step further by letting you listen to podcasts without even downloading and installing an app. Even less friction for people getting into podcasts. Some publishers already provide their own interfaces to play podcasts, but the experience is different on every site and it’s not possible to listen to all of your favorite podcasts in one place. Many don’t provide play links at all, just offering a “Subscribe in iTunes” link. Player FM aims to make podcasts simple.

What if you want to listen on a device other than your desktop or laptop computer? Your mobile phone, for instance? (Does anyone still use an iPod or other dedicated MP3 player?)

That’s covered.

The screenshot here shows my channel on my Samsung Galaxy SII Android smartphone. I bet it looks similar on an iPhone, a Windows phone and most other smartphones.

I think this is an especially useful feature that offers, again, ease of use with on-demand audio streaming via wifi or other network you connect to including cellular. No apps to install, just use your mobile browser.

And that highlights one issue to think about – connectivity.

If you have no network connection, then you have no podcasts to listen to.

Typically, I listen to podcasts either at my desk (so on a desktop computer with a wired internet connection) or in my car (usually streaming the content of the Pocket Casts app on my phone to my car radio using a Belkin Tunecast FM transmitter).

The latter use with Pocket Casts will let you stream over your cellular network connection or via wifi. But I prefer to have the podcast audio files on my mobile device, mostly for audio quality reasons (mobile networks tend to be iffy in terms of speed and stability especially when you’re moving), not to mention the relative high cost of streaming audio data on 3G if you don’t have an unlimited data plan.

Player.fm may well be developing an offline-listening choice, according to the FAQ:

[...] We don’t yet have offline support, and we know how much you want to play podcasts in the car, train, or gym, where you might not have internet access. Fixing this is definitely a priority for us.

In the meantime, if you want a frictionless listening experience from streaming on-demand audio with no fuss, and you have a network connection, Player.fm is a great option.

(Via GigaOm)

Related posts:

• 16 business podcasts worth listening to
• Make podcasting take off for you

Speaking on the PR and social media panel at the SAScon SEO, Analytics and Social Media conference yesterday prompted me to finish a draft blog post that I’ve been cogitating on since February looking at how social media and the internet has changed the way we do traditional media relations. My good friend and and ex-colleague Mark Hanson called it modernised media relations. I’m still not convinced about the name, but I am about the ideas all of which I’ve used successfully so here are some of the tips.

Some of these tips I talked about yesterday, but others are new as time didn’t allow me to cover everything.

Think online first

1) Know how newsrooms work today and don’t ignore online editors

Too often corporate communications and PR professionals think primarily about print and broadcast media, downplaying the importance of the online properties of mainstream media. Former Sky News journalist Ruth Barnett said that one of the most annoying things about PRs is that they don’t understand online and appreciate that a story that didn’t deserve “20 seconds of live coverage” might benefit massively from online coverage that would “exist on Google forever”.

Many publishers expect journalists to produce content for the paper and additional content for the website. Coupled with reducing headcounts this puts considerable extra pressure on them, where you can help. Another difference is deadlines. This now means different things at different media. Some still prioritise the print edition, others break news online first, most adopt a mixed approach.

2) Think beyond mainstream media

Blogs are the most obvious media to look at if you want to go beyond mainstream media. In fact many ‘blogs’ have become so big that they challenge and dwarf mainstream media. Blogs like Engadget and Huffington Post are now proper publishers with paid journalists and huge advertising revenues. Beyond this there is still a huge range of blogs still published by ‘amateurs’ in their spare time, many of which can be highly influential and are watched by mainstream media journalists looking for stories and sources.

Another more frequently neglected area is online forums. It was good at SAScon to hear MoneySupermarket’s Ben McKay cite the importance of the Martin Lewis Moneysavingexpert forums, he could equally have cited MoneySupermarket’s own forums which are highly influential in personal finance.

Search analytics and SEO

3) Use search analytics to create your target media list

One of the main tasks for junior public relations people is to compile a target media list. The traditional way of doing this is to use one of the many commercial media databases to find media outlets and journalists that cover your particular topic. Today that list is also likely to include some blogs. You’ll consider factors such as circulation, readership, ABC profiles of the readers etc in order to help identify the most important targets.

However, there is an alternative approach. Most internet sessions start with using search and many mainstream media websites rely largely on people arriving there by using a search engine. You can therefore start to select your media targets by finding out where people will arrive if they search for that topic. That’s where you want to be.

4) Use search data to pitch your content

So if many mainstream media websites rely on search to generate traffic then it’s logical that they would perhaps welcome content that helps generate search traffic. Ways you can use this include looking for content gaps where people are searching for particular keywords or phrases, but not finding what they are looking for. Another is to look at search trends to see what is increasing. Armed with this data you can then pitch mainstream media to say look here is the evidence people want this information and we can help to provide it.

5) Optimise your content for search

When you create content you should no longer just think how you can pitch it to media and get them to cover it – your ‘earned’ media. You should also be prioritising how you use it on your ‘owned’ media and optimise it for search. The more specialist you make your content the more successful this approach can be. You can then ‘pull’ people in to your content, rather than aggressively ‘pushing’ it out to them. Journalists use search to find information and identify sources. You’ll also be making your content directly accessible to your end target audience and stakeholders without relying totally on the third party filter of the media.

SEO specialists will also tell you that you’ve got to get in-bound links to your website. However, that’s easy said than done. Many of the sites that you’ll be prioritising because of their real world influence, such as the BBC, are the ones least likely to provide you with a link. Being persuasive or creative won’t work when they have strict rules governing the use of links to external sites.

Relationships and pitching

6) Social networks complement the pub

An oft-mistaken view of public relations is that it’s all about your contact book and drinks down the pub. Today social networks open up a whole new realm of possibilities. LinkedIn, Facebook and above all Twitter enable you to network with a much larger group of contacts. You can figure a lot about what a journalist is interested in and even what stories they might be working on simply by following them. Interaction becomes easier than ever and you build up a store of goodwill by retweeting their stories and tipping them off about useful stories or contacts that aren’t necessarily of any direct benefit to you or your clients.

And many media outlets make it easy to identify journalists by either publishing a directory on their websites like the New York Times does or with public Twitter lists such as the English list of Qatar-based Al Jazeera.

Content

7) It’s multimedia content, stupid

At it’s most basic modern media relations is about understanding the changing content needs of publishers. When I started out in public relations you’d hear stories about the dumb PR who’d post photographs to a radio news show. Today that isn’t so daft as websites mean that ‘newspapers’ want audio and video content, while radio stations need photos!

So you need to constantly be thinking about what content you can provide that adds value to readers and makes the journalist’s job easier. This might be video, behind the scenes photos, infographics, podcasts or whatever you can think of. Some publishers will want you to provide content directly, others simply to offer the right type of content and make it easy for them to get it themselves.

8 Securing coverage isn’t the end of the story

Once you’ve secured a great piece of coverage on a mainstream media website or blog there is still a lot more you can do with it. As well as tweeting out the link – and remembering to @credit the journalist that wrote it – you can also maximise the value of the coverage by writing about it on company blogs, ‘liking’ it on Facebook and Google+, bookmarking it on news aggregation and bookmarking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and Delicious. You can use Delicious to maintain a list of media coverage on your corporate website or online newsroom, although if you’re in the UK you need to consider the copyright of headlines following the legal action by Meltwater and the Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA) against the NLA.

If the story has attracted reasonable attention and conversation you can then use social curation tools like Storify and Scoop.it to add further value to the coverage. That creates even more good content, without a great deal of work on your part.

Engagement

9) Offer media more reader engagement

As ‘news’ has become increasingly commoditised and readers expect to find it for free it is becoming harder and harder for mainstream media to compete and differentiate themselves. One way they can do this is by engaging with readers and developing a stronger relationship with them. Public relations can help by providing exclusive interactive content such as live webchats, which can just be simple text or even video webcasts. Instead of just a journalist interviewing the chief financial officer about the multinational’s quarterly results you can offer the CFO up to answer questions directly from readers.

Become a publisher

10) EC=MC Every Company is a Media Company

Former FT journalist Tom Foremski coined the term EC=MC for Every Company is a Media Companyand this is one of the most powerful weapons in your public relations armoury. Creating a good social media newsroom or corporate blog enables you to directly reach journalists, influencers, customers and other stakeholders. Just some of the benefits include the fact that if done properly they help SEO; you can publish content that might not be of interest to mainstream media but is of interest to some stakeholders; reduce the number of ‘mundane’ calls to the press office by making it really easy to find relevant facts; by providing genuinely useful facts and information you can actually generate positive coverage and get journalists contacting you, rather than you pitching them.

This top 10 tips about how social media and SEO can improve your media relations could just as easily been a top 100 tip list so if you’ve got any more to share then feel free to do so in the comments and I might do an update post to highlight some of the best ones.

Related articles

• Speaking at SAScon | Search – Analytics – Social Media conference (stuartbruce.biz)
• Good crisis communications – 99p Stores CEO turns tables on BBC Watchdog (stuartbruce.biz)
• Social media crisis comms – outflanking the Sunday Times (stuartbruce.biz)

Even at 250 million Tweets per day in addition to the updates across Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, and every other feed that we willfully subscribe to, information overload is in of itself a fallacy. But the feeling the overload of information is very real and a reflection of our inability to pull the levers necessary to decrease noise and improve signal. Doing so, requires some very blatant actions that don’t simply reduce the volume of the information we don’t care to see as often, it requires disconnecting from human beings. Whether we’re severing ties with individuals or those representing an organization we once supported, it’s emotional. It’s an action that carries an element of guilt knowing that at some point, our action will cause an incremental blow to the psyche of the individual we’re unfollowing.

I know…so what right?

It still is what it is. Yet, we don’t unfollow or unlike as often as we should. So by not reminding people to not be more thoughtful about their posts and updates, we are by default enabling their objectionable behavior.

Think about why you Tweet or update your status. It’s part self-expression, part therapy, part fulfilling, and of course, part egocentric. You share something and naturally, you await or anticipate a response. There’s a bit of anticipation that builds up around it. Have you ever tried Qwitter? It’s an old school service, when compared to the overall history of the Twitter ecosystem, that tells you who unfollowed you, when, and gives you the Tweet that sent them over the edge.

We are as guilty by our inaction as others are for their action. And at the same time, we are also guilty of contributing to the noise. The truth is that it’s easier to blame others than hold up a digital mirror.  But now, some very interesting reports are substantiating what we’re feeling. In one such study conducted by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, MIT and Georgia Tech, people on Twitter said that only one-third of Tweets that hit their streams are worthwhile. All others are either at best “meh” or not worth reading at all. It’s not a surprise of course that a well-received Tweet is not all that common.

So, what makes a Tweet worthy of response or sharing? The team is currently studying the specifics, but initial findings point to tweets that included questions, featured curated/relevant information with added personality, and those used for self-promotion, such as including links to original content.

Paul André, a post-doctoral fellow in Carnegie Mellon’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) and lead author of the study explained an important outcome of the research, “If we understood what is worth reading and why, we might design better tools for presenting and filtering content, as well as help people understand the expectations of other users.”

While we await tools that will save us from ourselves, the research team documented nine best practices to use as an editorial guideline of sorts. While the information is drawn from insights on Twitter, I’m sure that they apply across other networks as well. The idea is that these lessons will improve our own streams while inspiring others to do the same…

9 Ways to Improve the Signal to Noise Ratio in Social Networks

1. News No Longer Breaks, it Tweets: Old news is no news. Twitter places emphasis on real-time information. Followers quickly get bored of even relatively fresh links seen multiple times – unless they’re repackaged through a different lens of context or perspective.

2. Add Perspective: Opinions in social media tend to spark dialogue. So, add an opinion, a pertinent fact or move the conversation forward rather than simply sending your update or hitting Like or Retweet. Consider the MT (modified Tweet) if you will to express your views. It is the difference between who you know you are and who others think you are that is fortified through your words.

3. K.I.S.S.: I often say, in brevity there’s clarity. Of course, it’s easier said than done. Studies show that followers appreciate conciseness. Keep it short. Using as few characters as possible also leaves room for longer, more satisfying comments on retweets. But even that’s not enough. Think about a new K.I.S.S. where simplicity is replaced with significance and short is substituted with baked-in shareability (Keep It Significant and Shareable).

4. Don’t #geekout with @’s and #Syntax LOL <-This!: It’s pretty easy to geek out on Twitter…especially when using 140 characters is already too complicated (kidding). Often we’re ompelled to overuse Twitter syntax such as #hashtags, @mentions, code, and abbreviations. But, if you study the art and science of Retweets, you’ll quickly learn that syntax might make you seem cool, but these tweets are harder to read, interpret, and by default, are unshareable. However, syntax can be helpful when context is inherent in the Tweet. For example, if posing a question, adding a hashtag that explains the nature of or the inspiration for the Tweet helps everyone follow along, which also lends to reactions.

5. Strengthen Your Inner Voice: For some reason, Twitter debilitates our ability to practice self restraint and therefore we are somehow inspired to express nonessential experiences. As the study found, these cliched “sandwich” Tweets about pedestrian or personal details were by and large disliked. If Tweets had an “unfavorite” button or if Facebook employed an “unlike” button, people would learn in real-time the hard lessons delivered through services such as Qwitter.

6. Context is King: As discussed early with K.I.S.S., short isn’t always a #winning strategy. Sometimes Tweets that are too short leave readers unable to understand their meaning. How many times have you read a Tweet where context, intention, or tone was impossible to discern? The study found that by simply linking to a blog or photo, without providing a reason to click on it was “lame.” Think about each Tweet or update as contributing to an experience or image that you want others to see of you or of your perspective.

7. If You Don’t Have Anything Good to Say…:  This is interesting to say the least. It should be no surprise that negative sentiments and complaints were disliked. Yet, people complain every day. In fact, there’s a bit of an inside joke on Twitter. It seems that only “social media experts” have problems with airlines because we’ll hear about it every time.  Studies show that too many complaints only turn off followers. The same is true on Facebook. Coincidentally, we are also learning that by taking to Twitter to vent, it’s both becoming the quickest path to resolution and also the act of expressing frustration proves cathartic. The community is far more forgiving of negative Tweets aimed at companies. But, if you aim your negativity at individuals regularly, you will lose favor among your followeres. Find.the.balance.

8. Introduce Brain Teasers: Savvy marketers, producers, and editors alike figured out long ago that building anticipation creates an appetite before an official release. While this isn’t new to the world of distribution, simply releasing content isn’t good enough. The idea is too build strategic and thoughtful anticipation for big Tweets. Often, if we’re caught up in conversations or observations, we miss an opportunity to alert followers that something big is about to come. So when we say something important, the response is stunted. Additionally, like news or professional organizations that want readers to click on their links, add a compelling hook. It’s important to not give away all of the news in the Tweet itself. Intrigue your followers.

9. Brands are People Too:  The study found that individuals or businesses with a public persona should pay particular attention to how their status updates lend to the brand they wish to portray. Sounds incredibly commonsensical, but it’s not as it ties to several of the bullets above. People often say things that erode the mystique or the grandeur of a persona by measure of the expectations of the community.  As the authors of the report share, “People often follow you to read professional insights and can be put off by personal gossip or everyday details.” I believe this is true for any individual or organization and as such, what’s shared and what isn’t shared should contribute to the perception desired.

Of course, it doesn’t take technology to introduce the importance of self-control and governance. But that’s part of the marvel here. We may in fact need tools to do what it is we cannot, tune out people en massé or withhold from expressing what we think in the moment or only say the things that reinforce the “personal brand” we envision. Whatever it is we do moving forward, what’s clear is that, according to research, Twitter, Facebook and other social networks are only reflections of our real world society. In the digital realm, by tweeting our lives, one can proudly exclaim, “I Tweet therefore I am.” And at the same time, one must consider whether or not simply Tweeting what comes to mind isn’t just contributing to a far more likely reality, “I Tweet and therefore I am…adding to the noise.”

What’s with the plethora of early morning news shows that routinely feature daily cooking segments at 6:45am? This past Wednesday, for example, WCBS-TV aired a positively revolting segment in which a local Manhattan chef grilled up a bunch of baby back ribs. Even more horrifying was the ersatz delight displayed by the anchors, weather, sports and traffic reporters as they sucked down the artery-clogging food. Indeed, Co-Anchor Mary Calvi actually complained there wasn’t enough BBQ sauce for her ribs. Poor thing.

Early morning cooking segments featuring fatty foods is exactly what this already obese nation doesn’t need. And, irony of ironies, the very same network that aired the baby back ribs at sunrise segment also broadcasts ‘The Doctors’ at 9am. So, in effect, CBS is telling viewers, ‘Do what we say, not what we do.’

I believe the media are a key, and corrosive, contributor to the malaise we, as a nation, are suffering. Gotcha journalism has replaced thoughtful and insightful reporting; tabloid headlines and sleazy photographs have bumped investigative journalism from the front page; and the notion of holding our nation’s leaders accountable for their actions has taken a back seat to promoting irresponsible, if not reckless behavior by the networks themselves (one need only look at the positive deluge of reality TV shows which shine the spotlight on the worst forms of human behavior). Sadly, the Founding Fathers didn’t think of placing checks or balances on the press when they passed the First Amendment. Of course, they couldn’t possibly have imagined a society populated by the likes of Snooki, John Edwards or randy Catholic priests either.

A baby back ribs segment at 6:45 am may not seem like much to you. But, to me, it’s just one more example of an out-of-control media monster that’s doing more harm than good.