Get ready for some familiar voices as Terry Fallis and Dave Jones join Joe, Gini and me for Inside PR 2.43, recorded before a ‘live studio audience’ at PodCamp Toronto. #PCTO is Canada’s largest social media event, an unconference now in its fifth year. Terry, Dave and I recorded episodes there in 2009 and 2010 and thought we’d get the (almost) whole crew together again. It’s a fun way to connect and reconnect with our listeners IRL. And it’s always great to see and thank our talented and hard-working producer, Yasmine Kashefi!
This week, Terry plays ‘host’ after nearly a year’s hiatus and reminisces about our five-minute-before-the-show-planning. He mentions PodCamp Toronto’s 5th anniversary and Joe notes PCTO has 1400 people registered. Eden Spodek, one of the event organizers talks about how in 2007, its first year, there were 300 early adopters and people thought it was about podcasting, but it’s always been focused on social media.
Joe believes the quality of speakers and discussion further demonstrates that Toronto is not only a Canadian business centre, but also a digital centre second to none with many great events and a smart and engaged community.
Martin comments that attendance at PCTO mirrors the adoption of social media and asks Dave about ROI and potato chips.
Dave observes SM should be realistic about what you can accomplish: in year one it’s very much about recruitment and engagement followed by entertainment, activation and reward; building community over time.
Joe talks about Kobo and wonders if clients are developing a longer-term sense of value for social media or if the pressure is on immediate sales.
Jodi Echakowitz makes a comment about about integration and uses an example of how her client, Sympatico, helped increase Kid’s Help Phone’s database by supporting a community.
Martin asks Gini how she transformed her firm from pure PR into a social media agency. Gini says she’s more of an integrated agency and talks about the need to educate clients on the fact that social media programs are a marathon. You have to built trust, credibility and relationships and that doesn’t happen overnight.
And that brings us to the end of part one of our #PCTO shows. We’d love to hear what you think and hope you tune in next week for part two.
Do you have comments? Send us an email or an audio comment to insideprcomments@gmail.com, join the Inside PR Facebookgroup, leave us a comment here, message us @inside_pr on Twitter, or connect with Gini Dietrich, Joe Thornley, and me on Twitter.
Our theme music was created by Damon de Szegheo; Roger Dey is our announcer.
This week’s episode was produced by Yasmine Kashefi.
Originally posted on the Inside PR blog.
