Inside PR 3.44: Getting Creative at South by Southwest V2V

• • Inside PR

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This week, we’ve got a special episode of Inside PR live from the South by Southwest V2V conference in Las Vegas. OK, live to digital audio.

Just before we recorded, I’d attended a high energy and insightful panel on creativity and brainstorming and invited the panelists to continue the discussion on the show.

Note: We’re in one of the speaker lounges so apologies for the sound quality and background noise. Next time, I’ll travel with my portable IPR studio, that is, I’ll find a quieter spot.

Our guests are:
Helen Todd, co-founder and CEO, Sociality Squared
Adam Marelli, artist and photographer based in NYC
Jim Hopkinson, fellow podcaster at the Hopkinson Report, author and principal of Hopkinson Creative Media
Jey Van-Sharp, business strategist and market analyst/editor at My Uber Life

Here are some highlights of our conversation:

Adam Marelli says one of the best pieces of advice he ever received on creativity came from a Zen monk who said do just one thing at a time. For Adam, no matter how long the to-do list becomes, he finds he’s most creative if he focuses on a specific task without distractions.

For Jey Van-Sharp, it’s all about prioritizing your priorities. He starts by thinking of the objective as a big boulder you can’t move very easily. Then he breaks it into smaller rocks and easy to handle pebbles, with each pebble being one task. Each day he picks several tasks to work on, knowing he can’t get through them all at once, but will accomplish the project over time.

Jim Hopkinson believes you should really know yourself and references a Paul Graham post on maker’s and manger’s schedules and how the two are often in opposition. Being creative means being a maker and it’s important to find clumps of uninterrupted time for your work.

Helen Todd agrees you need to block off periods during your day to cultivate your ideas. Her advice: avoid productive procrastination – where you work on administrative projects or answering emails because it makes you feel productive, when you should be focusing on the creative challenge at hand.

Final word goes to Adam who says, there’s an art to failure and you get there by practicing it; the separation between failure and success is very thin.

Do you consider yourself creative or in a creative job? What challenges do you have coming up with fresh ideas? Is creativity something you live and breathe or do you try to compartmentalize it? Any tips you’d like to share? We’d love to hear from you.

You may also be interested in the interview we did with Festival producer Christine Auten.

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Send us an email or an audio comment to [email protected], join the Inside PR Google+ Community, join the Inside PR Facebook group, leave us a comment here, message us @inside_pr on Twitter, or connect with Gini Dietrich, Joseph Thornley, and Martin Waxman on Twitter. Our theme music was created by Damon de Szegheo; Roger Dey is our announcer. Inside PR is produced by Kristine Simpson and Ashlea LeCompte.

Inside PR 3.43: Online Security for PR Pros

• • PR

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To start, Martin Waxman is gaming his Klout score by using Spin Sucks as his platform. He began with a Klout score of 68, used a guest post to encourage social shares and climbed to 70 before settling on 69.

Learn more about the experiment and what we learned in just a few days about the influence game.

But that’s not the main point of our podcast today.

The point of our discussion comes from a question from Liza Butcher.

She asks:

My Twitter account has been “compromised” three times in the last two weeks. I would love if you could do a show or part of a show on the best way to protect yourself and/or your organization from being hacked or, as Twitter calls it, “compromised.” Do you think this is something that is happening more and more?

As it relates to online privacy, I relate a story that happened with Spin Sucks where we were under attack for more than two weeks. Because we use LastPass to generate our passwords every few days, we lucked out and the worst that happened was the blog was slow. But if it had been two months ago, they would have gotten us for sure.

We discuss what online passwords mean to each of you personally, how to secure yourself, how to use good judgement, and which tools to use.

A special thanks to Liza and to David Jones for their comments.

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Send us an email or an audio comment to [email protected], join the Inside PR Google+ Community, join the Inside PR Facebook group, leave us a comment here, message us @inside_pr on Twitter, or connect with Gini Dietrich, Joseph Thornley, and Martin Waxman on Twitter. Our theme music was created by Damon de Szegheo; Roger Dey is our announcer. Inside PR is produced by Kristine Simpson and Ashlea LeCompte.

Inside PR 3.42: Our take on the Publicis Omnicom merger

• • PR

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In this week’s episode of the Inside PR podcast, Gini Dietrich, Martin Waxman and Joseph Thornley talk about the Omnicom Publicis merger. Will this yield opportunities for independent agencies? While the deal seems to have be driven by considerations of scale and efficiencies, what of the creatives who actually attract the clients? What about the clients themselves? Where was the client demand for this type of a deal? And what about the front line employees? Will they see immediate benefits from this deal or will they experience uncertainty as they wait for the other shoe to drop? Will they be distracted? Will smaller clients suffer from inattention as management focuses on securing the larger clients? And what about PR? Where does it fit in the thinking of the new mega-holding company?

Also in this episode, we discuss Hootsuite’s $165 million funding round and we receive a comment from David Jones, one of the original Inside PR podcasters.

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Send us an email or an audio comment to [email protected], join the Inside PR Google+ Community, join the Inside PR Facebook group, leave us a comment here, message us @inside_pr on Twitter, or connect with Gini Dietrich, Joseph Thornley, and Martin Waxman on Twitter. Our theme music was created by Damon de Szegheo; Roger Dey is our announcer. Inside PR is produced by Kristine Simpson and Ashlea LeCompte.