TWTWTW #23 🚀 Clubhouse on the future of PR and corporate affairs 🏔️ Amanda Gorman's The Hill We Climb 🗞️ Live journalist leads 🏞️ AI tool turns scribbles into landscapes 👩 Better Clubhouse biographies 📼 LinkedIn advertising video tutorials

Welcome

🙏 Are you feeling good?

Hi it's Stuart Bruce again invading your in-box with another dose of news and views about the future of public relations and corporate affairs. Are you feeling good today? I am. Last week was a good week with a flurry of new business leads from some wonderful people about potentially exciting projects.

I also had fun doing some more exploring of Clubhouse and experimenting with running my own Clubhouse rooms.

As usual let me know what you think of the links I've curated this week and tell me about anything interesting that you spot.

🚀 Join my Clubhouse room on the future of PR and corporate affairs 📈

I'm hosting another open Clubhouse room on Wednesday 27 January at 5pm in the UK, which is 6pm in most of the rest of Europe, 12pm EST, 9am PST, 10:30pm in Mumbai or 4am in Sydney.

It would be fantastic if you could join me.

News

🏔️ Were you blown away by Amanda Gorman's The Hill We Climb?

If you haven't heard about Amanda Gorman's amazing performance at President Joe Biden's inauguration then I want to know what rock you've been hiding under. It was a stunning example of amazing communications that stole the show. It wasn't just the wonder of the poem, but Amanda Gorman's pitch perfect performance that won me over. Watch it now.

AI

🏞️ NVIDIA AI tool turns your scribbles into stunning landscapes

Another day and another AI tool to blow your socks off. This time it's NVIDIA's tool to turn your rough landscape doodles into realistic landscape images.

There is a lot of absolute guff that claims to be AI and is actually just an automation tool or machine learning. But there is also some stuff that's genuinely impressive.

👩 Create a better Clubhouse biography using this free tool

I've spent a bit of time last week in Clubhouse, the invite only audio social network. It's early days and there are a lot of rubbish rooms filled with self-promoters. But I've also discovered some fascinating rooms with knowledgable, expert people having conversations about everything from social media (to be expected) to sustainability.

The best analogy I can think of is Clubhouse is a bit like talk radio. At its simplest you can just listen to an interesting room in the background while you do something else. The next step up is to 'call in' or in the case of Clubhouse to raise you hand and be invited to speak. The top two levels are hosting your own room and creating a new club.

One of the downsides of Clubhouse is it's hard to find the interesting rooms as it's real time so you have to attend while it's happening. Another is that it's still iOS only. As an Android user I've got round this by using it on my iPad, which isn't ideal but works. It does mean that lots of interesting people I'd like to host rooms with simply can't as they are in the 75% of users who prefer Android.

One tip to help with discovering better rooms is make sure you've got a great Clubhouse biography. You can use this free tool to help you.

Australian government vs. Google and Facebook

I've been following the tussle between the Australian government and the tech giants since it started. It's now coming to a head with Google threatening to shut search in Australia. Morally the Australian government appears to be in the right as the nub of the argument is trying to ensure local publishers and media get a fairer share of the revenue for their expensively produced content.

The reality is one country standing up to the might of Google, Facebook, Amazon et al isn't realistic. The EU is big enough and strong enough to succeed.

📼 LinkedIn launches on-demand video tutorials for advertising

LinkedIn is a powerful platform for advertising if you want to reach decision makers in companies and organizations. It's also fair to say its self-serve advertising platform isn't the most intuitive system ever devised.

This new series of on-demand video tutorials from LinkedIn is designed to explain how to get the most out of LinkedIn advertising, despite its confusing user interface.

CommTech tools

🗞️ Verified live journalist leads

There's no shortage of services providing live leads from journalists looking for sources for stories. Last week a new one launched. It filters all the rubbish from #journorequest on Twitter to provide quality alerts categorized into 28 different topics. I had a chat with co-founder Dan Griffiths who explained the ideas and ethos behind it. I have been testing it over the last week. Dan and his co-founder Jonathan Tullett know what they are doing as they are both ex-Response Source. This experience and expertise shows in the service.

It does exactly what it says. I've had a constant stream of quality leads in the topics I selected. My favourite three things about it are:

1) It's fast. When a journalist posts a request it is often satisfied extremely quickly so you need to get the alerts in as near real-time as possible.

2) It has a simple monthly subscription plan so none of those fiendishly complex contracts with ludicrous lock-ins.

3) You can get alerts in Microsoft Teams or Slack. It took me a couple of minutes to set up Teams alerts. This is much better than clogging your email inbox as depending on your topics you might get lots of alerts.

Dot Star Media has just added a nifty new feature which is keyword filters so you can reduce the volume of leads to ones that are most likely to be of interest.

There is a seven day free trial which I'd say is worth a shot.

Data, measurement, analytics

📊 Fabulous DataComms conference

It's only January 2021 and I've already attended a conference that I think was probably better than any of the conferences I attended last year. And I attended some excellent conferences last year.

The Communicate DataComms conference had a succession of great speakers and panellists. Every PR and communications professional needs to get to grips with using data and analytics. Whether you do it on a daily basis (as I do to advise clients) or you're a data newbie then you'll find something of interest. If you missed it then don't worry as the recording is available to stream on demand.

Even better news is that Communicate is running DataComms: Corporate communications in a post-pandemic world as a live event in November. My advice is don't miss it.