TWTWTW #19 🤑 PRTech Black Friday deals ♀️ Biden hires all-female comms team 🚽 Reporter live streams 💡 Dominic Cummings' missed opportunities 💱 Coinbase scoops NYT 📺 Next week's news today 🐋 Twitter verification is back

Welcome

🤑 Did you snag any Black Friday PRTech bargains?

I spent a good part of Saturday having a play with a bunch of new PRTech tools that I bought in Black Friday deals. I shared some of them in a blog post on Friday, which I've just updated. I think most of the deals are available until the end of 'Cyber Monday' on the US west coast so you've still got time to get them.

🤖 Four great PRTech tools in action | PR Futurist By Stuart Bruce

This week I've experimented with some of my shiny new PRTech tools that I bought as Black Friday deals. I used BigVu as a teleprompter to record me reading the newsletter. I then used Happy Scribe to add captions (and create a subtitles file for YouTube) before editing it in Invideo. I did it all in under an hour which included learning to use BigVu and Happy Scribe.

News

♀️ Biden hires all-female senior communications team

President elect Joe Biden is continuing to put together his new administration and has now appointed his senior communications team. Jennifer Psaki, a veteran Democratic spokeswoman, will be the familiar face of Biden's White House as press secretary. The communications director will be Kate Bedingfield, a long-time Biden aide who was his campaign communications director.

🚽 Canadian reporter live streams his stream

One of this week's viral stories that was guaranteed to leak was a Canadian reporter live-streaming his visit to the toilet when he forgot to mute his microphone. It joins the pantheon of hot mic incidents such as then US president Ronald Reagan's announcement that he was bombing Russia (it was a 'humorous' sound check that was recorded and leaked) and then UK prime minister Gordon Brown's "bigoted woman" remark while still wearing a Sky News radio mic.

Corporate affairs

🦠 Never let a good crisis go to waste: three companies thriving in the pandemic

"Never let a good crisis go to waste" is usually attributed to Winston Churchill. This is an interesting article that details how three CEOs have responded to the pandemic by finding positives in a crisis.

Data, measurement, analytics

📊 Lies, truth, data and statistics

I remember years ago Tom Murphy, who is now VP of communications at RingCentral, saying in a speech about the future of public relations that most PR people didn't need to worry about big data as they hadn't even mastered small data yet. Tragically it's still true today. This is a great article by Tim Sutton on the uses and abuses of data and statistics.

💡 How Dominic Cummings wasted the greatest opportunity of his life

This is a fascinating long-read article in The Economist about how big data needs big execution if it isn't to remain just a big dream. This one was added just before publication thanks to Louise Watson, the founder of Idea Scout and one of my The Decision Circle co-founders.

Crisis communication

💱 Coinbase prempts New York Times investigation by publishing first

I spotted this story on Twitter when Mike Butcher retweeted a tweet by Mike Isaac, a New York Times journalist. Isaac thought it an unusual (and wrong) communication strategy for Coinbase to publish its version of the story before the NYT one had been published. He's wrong as getting ahead of the story and publishing first is often a sensible strategy now that company's have the ability to do so via their owned media channels. Even pre-internet giving a negative story to a more 'friendly' journalist was an established crisis communication tactic. I don't know enough about the facts (nobody does unless they are involved) to comment on the substance of the story. But even externally I can see it was right for Coinbase to publish its version first. It was a story about its employees so Coinbase had a moral duty and practical need to tell them before it appeared in the media. Once it had done that it was inevitable it would leak therefore the only logical thing to do was to publish it first.

⬛ ‘Tokenized’: Inside Black Workers’ Struggles at Coinbase - The New York Times

Just to ensure balance this is the New York Times story that the Coinbase blog post was pre-empting.

CommTech tools

👨‍💻️ PR technology Black Friday deals

I've bought all of these PRTech Black Friday deals and I think most of them are available until the end of Cyber Monday (US Pacific time). Take a look at the blog post to see them all, but some of the highlights include lifetime deals for: AirMeet, a fantastic online conference and meeting platform; BigVu, a video recorder and editor with built-in teleprompter for Android, iOS and desktop; Publer, a powerful and easy to use social media publishing and scheduling tool; HappyScribe, an automated transcription tool that also creates proper files for subtitling videos to make videos accessible (and legal!).

Professional practice

New PRCA PR and Communications Council election results announced

The Public Relations and Communications Association (PRCA) has announced Julia Herd CMPRCA as its new chair of the PR and Communications Council. I've also rejoined the council as one of its elected members which I suppose means I've got to update my post-nominal letters to include CMPRCA which appears to be the new designation (or maybe I've just missed it earlier).

AI, digital and social

🐋 Twitter verification will be back early next year

The process used by Twitter to award its blue verified tick badge has always been mysterious and mired in controversy which eventually led to Twitter suspending part of the process including the ability to submit requests to be verified. Twitter has now started a consultation to make the process more transparent before it relaunches it in early 2021. Most of the new criteria appear to make sense to me. However, I see two big problems with it which I've fed back to Twitter as part of its consultation. The first is that many professional or business individuals who are already verified don't meet the new criteria. This needs to be addressed as it reflects badly on professionals who are actually more 'notable' as they have far more experience, expertise, qualifications and influence. The second is that by verifying candidates in national elections in certain countries Twitter is verifying some odd and not particularly notable people as being a national candidate doesn't take a lot of effort in many countries.

💧 Severn Trent's digital transformation uses WhatsApp to boost customer service

Diginomica has an interesting digital transformation case study on how Severn Trent Water is transforming its customer service to meet the needs of its eight million customers. WhatsApp has emerged as the channel of choice.

How to and tips

📺 The Planning Diary - predicting next week's news

This is an interesting experiment by Carol Jordan, head of planning at ITV News who has created a weekly newsletter with her predictions on the UK's biggest news stories of NEXT week. I spotted this one on Twitter and via Nick Walshe on Stephen Waddington's marketing, media and PR community of practice Facebook group.

Stuart Bruce Associates

Do you want to talk?

Don't be shy. Why not get in touch for a quick chat on how I can help you modernise your public relations practice including team skills and capability audits, measurement and evaluation and the choice, purchase and implementation of public relations technology #PRTech. Just get in touch via my Stuart Bruce Associates website. I'm always happy to jump on a Teams or Zoom call.

You can read the first 15 issues of That Was The Week That Was in the archive on Substack. There are links in the footer to follow me on Twitter, connect with me on LinkedIn or to read my PR blog.