00:15 - Boyd Neil, Hill & Knowlton's National Practice Leader of Corporate Communications, opens the podcast

00:53 - Panel Discussion with Toby Auterson, Senior Economist, Economist's Intelligence Unit and Dr. Warren Jestin, Chief Economist, Scotiabank

56:30 - Boyd Neil closes the podcast

Total Duration - 56:50

This week, Hill & Knowlton Canada's bi-weekly podcast -- Connected Conversation -- features a discussion with Alan Chumley about trends in measuring the impact of corporate and marketing communications programs.  

Alan recently joined Hill & Knowlton Canada's Toronto office as director of measurement. It is perhaps indicative of the extent to which measurement is on the minds of communications professionals that a leading Canadian consultancy has hired someone specifically to advance its thinking in this field.

In this podcast Alan talks how the analytic tools for measuring the impact of communications programs are getting better, and firms are beginning to realize that they can no longer get away with talking about public relations as simply a "soft art".

More about Alan, PR and measurement can be found here.

Comments, ideas, even disagreement, are always welcome.

Update: Alan's appointment notice can be found at Hillandknowlton.ca.

The fifth edition of Connected Conversation focuses on podcasting itself.

Host Boyd Neil talks with Brendan Hodgson, Hill & Knowlton's vice president of digital communications, about his views on the value -- if any -- of podcasting as a communications tool. Brendan is a podcasting agnostic who prefers to reserve his iPod for music. His preference is for the written word.

Personal reservations aside, however, Brendan agrees in this discussion that there is a place in the communications arsenal for podcasts -- a tool that is personal and verbal yet information rich.

Comments, ideas, even disagreement, are always welcome.

The concept of radical transparency was raised in the April 2007 issue of Wired magazine in an article by Clive Thomson called "The See-Through CEO. Thompson claims "Secrecy is dying. It's probably already dead."

Collin Douma, who writes a popular blog called Radical Trust and is a group creative director at a major advertising agency, used the concept at a Toronto social media event to challenge the value of, and values behind, the well-viewed bridezilla YouTube clip that turned out to be a set piece for a shampoo company.

In Connected Conversation #3, host Boyd Neil encourages Collin to say what he really thinks about corporate transparency in using social media as a marketing or corporate positioning tool.

The inaugural episode of Hill & Knowlton Canada's bi-weekly podcast - Connected Conversation - features a conversation with Ilyse Smith, a senior vice president in H&K's Toronto office.

Having recently completed work on a pandemic communication manual for a large client, Ilyse looks at some of the principles underlying successful pandemic communication preparation...key among them remembering that the most important audiences in a pandemic for any company will be its employees and customers. Providing information, direction - and reassurance - to those audiences is a function of direct, un-intermediated communication: the media's attention, and its interest, will be elsewhere.

For organizations still putting together their pandemic communications, Ilyse suggests taking a look at the following web sites:

World Health Organization outbreak communications guidelines

A good general resource from government of Canada

Here is a good business continuity planning tool

Well-known academic Peter Sandman makes some suggestions here

From the Pan America Health Organization - a division of the WHO