Interviews

Thanks to the Mashable team for being patient as PRNewser took some time before posting this video today with site Founder Peter Cashmore, shot at New York's Internet Week earlier this month.

Mashable is a must read for not only social media savvy PR pros, but professionals from all industries looking to get the latest social media news. It has grown immensely with an audience of almost two million unique monthly visitors according to Compete. It is ranked among the top 10 blogs in the world according to the blog ranking service Technorati.

In this interview, Pete talks to PRNewser about how PR pros can best work with the staff at Mashable, what kind of stories have been resonating with readers, and what publishers including Mashable are doing to boost reader engagement.

Stephen Baker's career as a journalist has taken him around the world, from Mexico and Venezuela to Paris, and began with The Black River Tribune, a local newspaper in Ludlow, VT.

Baker is a speaker at our upcoming Mediabisto Circus conference, and PRNewser caught up with him this week to discuss his panel at Circus, the marketing ramifications of data presented in his recently released book, "The Numerati," before of course getting into some PR related topics.

Your panel at Mediabistro Circus is titled, "Relevance and Influence: Can Data Bring You Closer to Your Audience?" with the descriptor of, "where we're headed with data, and how it is impacting marketing, advertising, and the media business as a whole." Without giving away too much from the discussion - what are some of these impacts?

I would say that there are two big areas that I barely brushed on in the book that are going to be enormous area of opportunities for marketers.

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mediabistro.com's biggest event of the year, the Mediabisto Circus is coming up this June 2nd and 3rd in New York. We hope you'll be able to join us, as the events team has assembled an all-star lineup that fits into this year's theme: "Extraordinary Impact: Where Media Meets Technology."

One of this year's presenters, Steve Rubel, SVP and Director of Insights for Edelman Digital, took some time to speak with PRNewser about a variety of topics in advance of the conference. Rubel gave us his take on the rapidly changing media landscape - "I don't know what media is anymore." - his advice for job hunters - "Decide what your core genius is." - and PRWeek's decision to go behind a subscription wall online - "I don't think they have a choice."

Your presentation at Mediabistro Circus is titled "Brand All-Stars," with the descriptor, "having a powerful personal brand might be one of the most important assets you can have, especially during turbulent economic times." Who in PR/marketing do you follow that have powerful personal brands?

There are a lot of people.

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I joined TVNewser's Steve Krakauer and FishbowlNY editor Glynnis MacNicol to talk a little shop this morning on the Morning Media Menu podast. We talked about the Domino's pizza damage control story and the CEO's "overcooked" response, the search for an all-encompassing reputation dashboard, and of course, Ashton Kutcher beating CNN in the race to amass a million followers on Twitter.

You can listen to all the past podcasts at BlogTalkRadio.com/mediabistro and call in at 646-929-0321 on weekday mornings at 9 AM.

Exclusive: Another journalist jumped to a PR agency today as Keith O'Brien leaves his editor-in-chief post at PRWeek to join Attention!PR. O'Brien will focus on the tech and media practices at the roughly 25-person firm when he starts the job on April 29th. The firm handles work for The Daily Beast, Consumer Reports, Bluefly.com, SocialMedia.com, and Mashable among other brands.

I took the opportunity to interview O'Brien to find out what prompted the move, and what he hopes to do and learn in his new life as a consultant. Incidentally, my co-editor Joe Ciarallo interviewed both O'Brien and Attention!'s founder Curtis Hougland in recent months. You can find those here and here.

PRNewser: How do you know Curtis and Attention? What attracted you to them?

O'Brien: I know Curtis through PRWeek. I have high respect for him, think the firm does great work, and has an impressive client list for a relatively new agency. I decided that I wanted to put into practice the things I learned while covering the industry. Attention was the perfect fit.

More after the jump:

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SXSW is officially over, however here at PRNewser we still have a few more interviews to post from the conference that we think you'll enjoy. Today's interview is with Greg Matthews, Director of Consumer Innovation at Humana, a Fortune 100 healthcare company that is doing a lot more than what one would think a "traditional" healthcare company does. Greg is a member of Humana's Innovation Center, which has been tasked to come up with, "creative ways to help people be healthy while having fun." You can view the Innovation Center's projects here.

We specifically wanted to talk to Matthews about the fact that even though much of the Innovation Center's work has integrated social media, there is not one person on the team with a marketing or PR background. "Human's innovation center is kind of a unique place," said Matthews. "It was designed to be a place that's helping to take this company that is in a very traditional industry, forward into a kind of new future and really reshape that industry, and so none of the people that work on our team actually have a healthcare background, and frankly none of us have a background in social media either." The takeaway: How can you work in social media in ways that go beyond just PR and marketing?

In advance of his keynote today at the South by Southwest conference, PRNewser spoke with web entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki about a variety of topics, notably how such a well connected person such as himself still finds value in working with a PR firm. (Kawasaki employs Porter Novelli.)

"I may know a lot of people, but that doesn't mean I know every blogger. Take something like Mashable, they have ten reporters. I don't know all ten of them. I don't know which one is the most logical for me," he said.

When asked about what PR firms can do in addition to providing "arms and legs" support such as scheduling media briefings, Kawasaki said, "The strategic level is about...should it be Mashable, or should it be BoingBoing? These are crucial questions and I'm in the thick of it, and I don't know, so I gotta believe that some people who are not in the thick of it and not hanging out at things like this, they really don't know. You wouldn't just buy QuickBooks and then decide to do all your books, you would hire an accounting firm. And this is the same thing, you hire the pros who know how to do it."

Kawasaki also said it's important for PR firms to "just beat the crap out of you and get you prepared for the tough questions." He likened this to the CEO who never gets told to make changes, but is rather just surround by an entourage of "yes men/women" at both the company and the PR firm. Kawasaki said it is PR's "moral obligation" not to do this, and to provide constructive feedback.

In terms of his keynote today with Chris Anderson, Kawasaki said he likes to stay at a "5,000 foot view as opposed to a 50,000 foot view" and have people come away with tactical advice they can apply to their businesses. A businessman himself, Kawasaki closed the interview by mentioning his Alltop and now MyAlltop service, a valuable directory of blogs by topic - he calls it an "online magazine rack" - that PR pros can use when researching bloggers.

PRNewser has covered the debate around "sponsored conversations" aka sponsored blog posts, so naturally we had to catch up with someone who is at the center of the debate, IZEA founder and CEO Ted Murphy.

Murphy, whose company used to be called PayPerPost, recently told us that the name change was "more about our growth than PR. As the company has matured we have launched different products that didn't make sense under the PayPerPost name." See here for our recent coverage of the "sponsored conversation" debate, which recently moved forward via an official report from Forrester Research, followed by a response from Google.

Murhpy told us that IZEA's "sponsored conversation" offering will soon be expanding to Facebook and Twitter, which raises questions about disclosure and authenticity. He also mentioned that it's been somewhat of a long slog for the company to get to this point, saying, "It's taken probably three years for people to warm up to what we do."

We have questions, people have answers. In this interview, PRWeek SF Bureau Chief Aarti Shah discusses, among other topics, how to pitch PRWeek ("If you want to be in our news section, pitch a campaign right when it launches - or even better -- before."), the changing industry landscape ("The rock star PR CEOs of the bubble era are - for the most part - no longer major industry players.") and social media press releases ("I'm mixed on this.")

Read on for the full interview.

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Fifteen Minutes Public Relations CEO Howard Bragman is the subject of a mediabistro "So, What Do You Do" feature interview today. A Hollywood PR power player, Bragman says he is unlike other publicists in town who sometimes avoid the media:

In terms of dealing with the media, I believe integrity is very important, and I'm pretty proud of my reputation. I'm in the communications business. There's a lot of PR people in this town who seem to be proud that they're inaccessible. You can't talk to them and they don't return emails, and I'm sort of proud of the opposite. If a journalist approaches me, even if it's a "Sorry, we're going to pass on that," they'll generally get a communication from me.

Read the full interview here.