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A New Approach to Influencer Marketing

Video Marketing,

Doug SimonDoug Simon

A Google search of “What’s Wrong with Influencer Marketing?” generates more than 28 million results. Influencer Marketing is popular because it works, but clearly there are problems with the way it’s currently being practiced. Are you building long term value? Are you putting your brand’s trust and authenticity at risk?

O'Dwyer's Apr. '17 Social Media Broadcast Services MagazineThis article is featured in O’Dwyer’s Apr. ’17 Social Media Broadcast Services Magazine

As practiced today, we’ll see the law of diminishing returns take effect with influencer marketing. As Gary Vaynerchuk, CEO of VaynerMedia says “marketers ruin everything.” As we go from the Kardashians to micro-influencers, what could go wrong? 

It’s time to flip the script on the traditional approach to influencer marketing. Instead of working with influencers as brand reps, we need to be promoting our own experts. We need to redefine influencer marketing.

According to the 2017 Edelman Trust Barometer, trust for business is 27% higher than trust for government and 21% higher than trust for media. NGOs are even more trusted. So, why are we risking our authenticity by putting our brand’s reputation in the hands of outside influencers? Is there a smarter way to partner with influencers to grow your brand and your influence without the risk?

Andy Polansky, CEO at Weber Shandwick noted “the strong link between corporate reputation and CEO engagement” in a recent press release. This approach builds long term value for your organization. This approach builds authenticity and trust.

Surprisingly, turning your experts into influencers also helps to earn media across platforms. The D S Simon Media Brand Video Communications Report found, your in-house experts outperform third-party spokespeople. In the report, 200 brand communicators were surveyed.  84% of them reported being satisfied or very satisfied with their own expert’s ability to earn media, more than double the level when using outside experts. PR agency people also found in-house experts outperformed outside spokespeople. This matches our internal results when clients feature in-house experts during Influencer Media Tours.  Perhaps it’s time to remember the forgotten influencer inside your organization.

But do outside influencers still have a role? Yes. Instead of working with influencers as brand reps, we recommend partnering with them as media bringing your experts to their audiences without the risk. These outside influencers can amplify your message by interacting with your experts, via video and sharing the content with their audiences on Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram or Twitter as well as traditional broadcast channels. This provides a safe harbor for your brand while building the amount of influence your expert or leader has — all key factors for growth.

Here are some tactics that work With Influencer Media Tours your spokespeople will be interviewed by influencers on television, radio, online and through social media channels. Influencer Media Packages provide custom content with your experts directly to influencers in your space. As part of an Influencer Video Series, your in-house expert engages in conversations with key opinion leaders, business prospects and online influencers to expand your reach. Some other useful tools are Influencer Junkets and Digital Press Conferences that allow you to generate media coverage around the globe. With any approach authenticity is key and leveraging your internal experts is more cost-effective and ensures your brand messaging is delivered in the most reliable way possible.

Leaders at major brands understand the power of an authentic spokesperson. We recently worked with the Head of Products at Check Point Software Technologies, Michael Shaulov, who served as the spokesperson for his company’s recent media outreach. He had this to say about the benefits of using internal leaders as spokespeople: “Dealing with customers, we are in the field, we are in the ecosystem day and night. When we talk about those topics we are way more credible then someone you might bring from outside because we can bring real examples that we’ve experienced over the last couple of weeks, relevant information that we’ve captured from our customers. With the industry today, this goes way better than anything else.” Nicole Hayes, an in-house spokesperson for Toys’R’Us also said “We truly value what we do in bringing our expert toy opinions and baby opinions to media so you get that inside look and that true expert opinion from us directly.”

D S Simon Media is partnering with equities.com, House Party, Inc, Looksmart and The DGTL Advisors to amplify messages. Our influencer marketing division has these tips to get the best results:

• Treat third-party influencers like media instead of a brand rep to amplify your expert’s message without the risk

• Invite media and influencers to have a conversation with your leader via video that can be shared by all parties

• Create custom video content with your experts designed to be distributed by specific influencers

• Create video series where your experts interact with influencers

• Post video featuring your experts on your social media platforms that can be used as a tool to pitch the media and promote initiatives.

• Remember you save money using an in-house expert. Use that to expand reach.

Something needs to change. We’ve seen many examples of how influencer marketing can go wrong. Take for example Disney’s alignment with YouTube megastar Pewdiepie. Earlier this year, reports surfaced of anti-Semitic content in Pewdiepie’s videos and Disney had to quickly distance themselves to protect its brand.

Bad behavior is not the only risk. Third-party influencers hired by brands as media spokespeople can be less familiar with the story and more prone to error and misstatements.  During a partnership with Adidas last year, supermodel Naomi Campbell accidentally copied and pasted an entire email from the Adidas marketing team in the caption of an Instagram post that read: “Naomi, so nice to see you in good spirits!!! Could you put something like: Thanks to my friend @gary.aspden and all at adidas — loving these adidas 350 SPZL from the adidas Spezial range.  😘 😘 💜 ✊ @adidasoriginals.” A lack of authenticity in influencer marketing is going to be a growing concern.

Increasingly, your key audiences value trust and authenticity. Your own experts and leaders know the story and subject matter. They need far less training and are less likely to be flustered by an unexpected question. By investing in your own people instead of outside experts you are positioning your organization for long-term growth. You can create content that feeds your social media eco-system. You can provide a platform for your leadership. Your leaders are the forgotten influencers no more.

***

Doug Simon is CEO of D S Simon Media, an influencer marketing company. 

Hyundai’s Innovative ‘Comebackpedia’ tops meme marketing

Video Marketing,

New Delhi , Apr 13 (ANI-BusinessWireIndia): Hyundai Motor India Ltd, (HMIL) the country’s car exporter and second largest passenger car manufacturer, received an overwhelming response for its first-of-its-kind innovative digital campaign ‘Comebackpedia’ on the newly launched 2017 Grand i10.

The campaign garnered over 6.7 million views across social media. Based on Humour, around 10,400 interesting Memes were generated by users and shared on Social Networking sites.

« We believe Hero Content always makes the brand distinctive and engages the user effectively. We took humor as the campaign driver by engaging the popular Humour Artists to do the Meme sourcing with fun elements. We are glad that Comebackpedia has received huge popularity and appreciation from our Customers, social media fans and Critics, » said Sr. General Manager and Group Head Marketing, HMIL, Puneet Anand.

« Comebackpedia » campaign is the first of its kind done by an Auto Brand has utilized Meme marketing to capitalize on the huge popularity of these humor artists amongst the youth with the New 2017 Grand i10. « Comebackpedia », is a unique encyclopedia of comeback memes with branded video content of popular humor artists like Cyrus Broacha, Vir Das, MallikaDua, Amit Tandon, Vipul Goyal, KaneezSurka and Rahul Dua.

The campaign was designed to invite fans to log on to www.itswowsome.com and create a MEME using the expressions of their favorite humor artists, by simply adding an interesting reaction to a comeback and share with their friends. The most unique MEMEs featured in the video series created by the artists and participants also got a chance to win #Wowsome merchandise.

Campaign related Video content was released in three phases. First phase – humorous videos of the artists inviting fans to create comeback memes and engage with the brand. Second phase – ‘The Comebackpedia Show’, was released which featured winning memes and Artist’s hilarious versions of Come backs in a second episode show.

The third phase included a dramatic, upbeat and humorous video which concluded the entire campaign with brand integration highlighting ‘The Drive with Besties’ when one buys a new car. (ANI-BusinessWireIndia)

TCU’s New Video-Production Team Commits to Media-Management Workflows

Video Marketing,

Studio Network Solutions products support Horned Frogs storytelling efforts

When Chris Salters was brought on board at Texas Christian University to run a new video-production unit within the athletic department’s marketing division, the first question he had was simple: how do you store your content? When he was shown a shelf of external hard drives and a 2-TB university server typically used for low-impact data transfer, he knew what was going to the top of his priority list.

TCU invested in a Studio Network Solutions EVO media-management system to bolster the efficiency and organization of its new video-production team.

Salters was given the go signal to begin scouting out the options available, and, after a few months of research, the university purchased a 16-bay Studio Network Solutions EVO shared-storage system, which offers a 64-bit, multi-CPU, multicore, 3RU server. With the EVO and the SNS ShareBrowser file and asset manager, the department is establishing an efficient workflow for archiving, searching, and managing its assets for its shoots for various shows and social-media campaigns.

“[EVO] allows us to log our footage and add metadata, and it’s all searchable,” says Salters, who is director of video production for TCU Athletics.

He went with SNS EVO also because TCU is an Adobe Premiere house and EVO has storage integration with XenData LTO. When that element is added in the coming year, the ShareBrowser software will log and keep track of media archived to LTO tape.

“The biggest issue we had aside from adding more staff, who needed a unified area to access this media, is that we needed the speed to access it,” Salters explains. “Our local server is built for data, and it applies to 95% of the rest of the campus, but that doesn’t quite work for video. When we started going down this path, I showed what it’s like to scrub through a video and my computer stalls. That’s not workable.”

TCU’s new video team is dedicated to delivering a more cinematic style of storytelling.

The team is growing but continues to be a small group, comprising two full-time staffers with a grad assistant and some student workers. When the new media-management system was formally put in place in mid January, the staff began immediately dropping footage into the system when returning from ENG shoots. Such elements as naming conventions and metadata constitute a learning process.

“It’s still evolving,” Salters notes. “We’re still developing what we want to do with the metadata tagging because, at some point, it can become too much information that you save. What is important? We’re still working through that.”

He was brought in to run the new video team, which is dedicated to producing all in-venue videoboard shows, shooting content for website and social-media distribution, and giving a shot in the arm to a 30-minute linear-television program that the athletic department produces for the local Fox Sports regional network. The goal is to bring a more cinematic, storytelling feel to TCU’s video productions.

“I’m excited to see what comes from this department,” says Salters. “We’ve had a lot of changes within the past year, and I think it’s only going to get bigger and better. It’s pretty cool to be a part of it.”

What To Keep In Mind When Applying SEO Principles To Your Video Marketing Strategy

Video Marketing, , , ,

Shutterstock

Some critical questions are being fielded by digital marketing agencies today regarding video and search engine optimization (SEO). For example, is SEO necessary when creating a video? And, if so, why? The answer is a resounding yes: Google carries a great deal of weight when it comes to controlling market share in the world of search.

Since 2006, Google has owned YouTube — a platform more popular on desktops than Google itself. The connection to search and video is quite obvious.

Our firm happens to be a niche player with offerings to assist with advertising, digital marketing, data and call center solutions for the insurance sector. We field many calls about video and the importance of it in establishing a strong digital footprint for clients.

There are three main things to keep in mind when utilizing SEO strategies with your videos. You need to have a firm understanding of your company’s brand and goals, tailor your content to your target market with relevant words and phrases at an appropriate length, and make use of the tools of influence and persuasion to generate leads.

Vision, Goals And Values

When helping our clients and potential clients, we ask them two important questions before proposing a design plan:

  1. What is your business attempting to achieve?

  2. Are you willing to make modifications to your strategy if your goals are not being achieved?

In certain cases, video might be used for branding to help the business name become a household name; in other cases, it might serve to support search engine optimization rules to rank or create website traffic. We elaborate on some of those rules in this video.

Some of the rules are based on the age of your URL, quality of on-page content, website page speed, properly tagged images, link building and monthly article posting to a website blog. Video is no different when going after SEO, so be sure headlines and descriptions for your videos are precise and straightforward to tell your audience exactly what they’re going to watch.

Search engine robots rely on textual information, so this is very important: balancing what attracts users with effective SEO implementation when it comes to best practices. Once these questions are answered, our staff will begin the design and content strategy stage to align with our client’s goals. Is it just branding of the firm that’s important, or is a call to action needed to increase leads?

Trump path to a health care win is clear: Andy Slavitt

Video Marketing, , , ,

The dealmaker-in-chief badly wants a deal on health care. President Trump has even been willing to hold his nose and support terms put forward by the hardcore conservative House Freedom Caucus that are hugely unpopular with his own backers, like allowing insurance companies to turn down people with pre-existing medical conditions. Piled on top of a Republican bill with only 17% public approval, the further he goes to the right, the more likely he will come up empty-handed.

Since repeal didn’t go the way Trump thought it would, now is a good time for him to step back and decide what he wants to accomplish. The political imperative to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act has shifted decisively. After learning about the alternative proposed by Congress, a record high 55% of Americans favor the ACA. Three-quarters say the president should try to make the law work and 61%, including a majority of Trump supporters, say he and the GOP are responsible for any problems going forward.

A little history is in order. Republican sabotage of the ACA predates Trump’s presidency. Championed first by outside groups and lawyers, one of the GOP’s biggest victories was stripping funding to insurers that was designed to keep rates from rising too fast. When Congress removed the money after the fact, among the first victims were a dozen or so new health plans called co-ops, included in the ACA to add competition in low-competition areas.

The law’s opponents went beyond garden-variety political tactics. They filed numerous lawsuits to cripple the ACA by pulling out core pieces. Insurers reported being warned by Republican congressional leaders not to participate. And, most notably, Republican governors or legislatures in 19 states turned down funds to cover millions under Medicaid.

The results of this sabotage include higher premiums, higher costs to taxpayers, millions of people in Southern and rural states left without insurance, and only one or two competitors left in many markets as insurers withdrew or were forced out of business. All so Republicans could point to the ACA and say, « See, it doesn’t work. »

Here’s the bipartisan path forward on health care: Andy Slavitt

Our health care plan for America: Paul Ryan

So far the Trump administration is continuing that sabotage from the Oval Office. Standard Poor reported last week that the exchanges are stable and the biggest impediments to success are now the administration’s own delays and potential tampering.

For instance, insurers are within weeks of setting their initial premium levels for 2018 and the administration hasn’t indicated whether it will continue payments that insurance companies use to reduce deductibles for low-income consumers. I met with a dozen insurance CEOs last week, each of whom told me that if funding isn’t confirmed by April 30, premiums will increase significantly — by 19% in one recent analysis.

How does Trump shift to an agenda that can gain broad support? He can start by throwing off the most extreme aspects of the Republican plan to gut the Medicaid safety net. This was always House Speaker Paul Ryan’s idea, anyway. It was never Trump’s and it was never popular with his base, so it shouldn’t be hard for him to abandon. And he has the perfect rationale.

The opioid crisis, one of the centerpieces of Trump’s domestic commitments, provides the opportunity to shift the dialogue on Medicaid. On the campaign trail in August, he promised to help people addicted to opioids. “We’re going to work with them, we’re going to spend the money, we’re going to get that habit broken,” he said in Columbus, Ohio. Medicaid funds a full one-third of opioid treatments and directly serves Trump’s base. More than four in 10 non-elderly Medicaid recipients are white, and the share is higher than that in rural states. In West Virginia, for instance, it’s 89%.

POLICING THE USA: A look at race, justice, media 

Trump budget cuts don’t go far enough: Jon Gabriel

Forgoing Medicaid cuts not only serves Trump’s constituents, who pay much more and lose coverage under the current Republican plan, but allows him to forge the alliances needed to create a bipartisan deal. They include a broad congressional coalition, ranging from Democrats to conservative Republicans, as well as governors who have been leading the fight against opioid addiction — among them Republicans John Kasich of Ohio and Charlie Baker of Massachusetts and Democrats Roy Cooper of North Carolina and Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania.

Until Trump takes these steps, no Democrat or centrist Republican will come to the table. That leaves him struggling to assemble a coalition of only the most extreme and unpopular views, and not enough support to get a bill through both the House and Senate. The president’s reaction to events in Syria shows he’s not moored to ideological positions and can pivot when he wants to. Trump’s choice is between sabotaging the ACA and helping his voters. Fortunately for him, choosing his voters is also the path to a deal that can put a health care victory on the board.

Andy Slavitt, a senior adviser to the Bipartisan Policy Center and a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors, is a former health care industry executive who was acting administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services from 2015 to 2017. Follow him on Twitter @ASlavitt 

You can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributors and other writers on the Opinion front page, on Twitter @USATOpinion and in our daily Opinion newsletter. To submit a letter, comment or column, check our submission guidelines.

Kim Jong Un’s rockets are getting an important boost — from China

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Participants practice Wednesday for a parade on the main Kim Il Sung square in central Pyongyang. (Damir Sagolj/Reuters)

When North Korea launched its Kwangmyongsong-4 satellite into space last February, officials heralded the event as a birthday gift for dead leader Kim Jong Il. But the day also brought an unexpected prize for the country’s adversaries: priceless intelligence in the form of rocket parts that fell into the Yellow Sea.

Entire sections of booster rocket were snagged by South Korea’s navy and then scrutinized by international weapons experts for clues about the state of North Korea’s missile program. Along with motor parts and wiring, investigators discerned a pattern. Many key components were foreign-made, acquired from businesses based in China.

The trove “demonstrates the continuing critical importance of high-end, foreign-sourced components” in building the missiles North Korea uses to threaten its neighbors, a U.N. expert team concluded in a report released last month. When U.N. officials contacted the implicated Chinese firms to ask about the parts, the report said, they received only silence.

China’s complex relationship with North Korea was a key topic during last week’s U.S. visit by President Xi Jinping, as Trump administration officials urged Chinese counterparts to apply more pressure on Pyongyang to halt its work on nuclear weapons and long-range delivery systems. Yet, despite China’s public efforts to rein in North Korea’s provocative behavior, Chinese companies continue to act as enablers, supplying the isolated communist regime with technology and hardware that allow its missiles to take flight, according to current and former U.S. and U.N. officials and independent weapons experts.

The private assistance has included sensitive software and other items specifically banned for export to North Korea under U.N. Security Council sanctions, the officials and experts said.

China has officially denied that such illegal exports exist, but investigations show restricted products were shipped privately to North Korea as recently as 18 months ago. Still unclear, analysts said, is whether the Chinese government tacitly approved of the exports, or is simply unable or unwilling to police the thousands of Chinese companies that account for more than 80 percent of all foreign goods imported by North Korea each year.

“There’s all kinds of slack in the system,” said Joshua Pollack, a former consultant to U.S. government agencies on arms control and a senior research associate with the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. “It could be that the Chinese don’t care enough to do much about it. A second possibility it that they don’t have the systems — such as strong export controls — in place. Or that it’s just corruption.”

[Will North Korea fire a missile that can hit the U. S.? Probably]

Whatever the reason, experts say, the flow of products through China has allowed North Korea’s missiles engineers to achieve progress that would otherwise be difficult for an impoverished regime that is cut off from the West and lacks a sophisticated microelectronics industry.

When confronted privately about such exports, Chinese officials have typically demanded high levels of proof — specific names and dates that can be difficult to derive from water-damaged rocket parts pulled from the ocean, said an Obama administration nonproliferation official involved in sensitive negotiations with China over its relations with North Korea.

“They’d say, ‘give us details,’ but in most cases we could never say it was ‘this precise person on this precise day,’” said the official, who insisted on anonymity in describing diplomatic negotiations. “With them, it was never a team sport. It was always just the bare minimum of what they had to do in order to avoid having to take serious action.”

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North Korea’s Unha-3 rocket lifts off from the Sohae launchpad in Tongchang-ri, North Korea, in 2012. (Korean Central News Agency via AP/Korean Central News Agency via AP)

The Unha-3, the rocket that launched North Korea’s Kwangmyongsong-4 satellite into orbit on Feb. 7, 2016, was among the most powerful ever built by Kim Jong Un’s government. It is also the most worrisome. U.S. and South Korean intelligence officials have long believed that the three-stage, 100-foot-tall rocket was designed as a forerunner for a future nuclear-tipped space vehicle that could allow North Korea to threaten cities as far away as Washington.

Mindful that spy agencies would seek to recover spent parts after the launch, North Korean engineers laced the rocket with explosives so that each stage would self-destruct while hurtling back to Earth. Still, South Korean navy ships were waiting to scoop up any parts that survived, eventually harvesting enough components to allow a crude reconstruction of the entire rocket.

Investigators determined that the Unha-3’s frame was indigenously made. But inside the rocket’s shell was an array of electronics, including specialized pressure sensors, transmitters and circuitry. An extensive probe by U.S. and South Korean officials revealed that many of the components had been manufactured in Western countries and shipped to North Korea by Chinese distributors — a finding that was echoed in the United Nations Panel of Experts report made public on March 9.

[Satellite photos suggest another n-test is imminent.]

The report, which received scant attention outside the world body, described elaborate systems for disguising technology exports intended for North Korea. Some schemes involved Chinese front-companies created by North Korean intelligence agencies; others were run through banks created as joint ventures by Pyongyang and foreign partners, including Chinese financial institutions. As sanctions grew tougher, the sanction-busters simply learned new tricks for getting around the rules, the panel’s investigators found.

“The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is flouting sanctions through trade in prohibited goods, with evasion techniques that are increasing in scale, scope and sophistication,” the eight-member panel concluded. International resolve for approving new sanctions had “not yet been matched,” the report said, “by the requisite political will, prioritization and resource allocation to ensure effective implementation.”

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North Korean leader Kim Jong Un watched the ground jet test of a Korean-style high-thrust engine newly developed by the Academy of the National Defence Science in this undated photograph. (Korean Central News Agency /Reuters)

Some of the banned components exported to North Korea can’t be found inside a missile frame. A separate report by U.S. weapons experts reveals how Pyongyang used Chinese middlemen to obtain access to European-made software essential for making parts that go inside advanced rockets.

The report recounts a 2015 business deal in which a European manufacturer agreed to sell sensitive software and industrial-control systems to a Chinese company based in the northeastern Chinese city of Shenyang, about 150 miles from the North Korean border. The deal that came with an important condition: None of the items were to be resold to North Korea.

The agreement was quickly broken, according to the report by the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington nonprofit that focuses on nuclear-weapons proliferation. The purchaser, a manufacturing giant in northeastern China known as the Shenyang Machine Tool Co. Ltd., integrated the European technology in its own line of industrial milling machines used to make metal parts. Two of those machines were then sold to North Korea, the report said. While North Korea’s eventual use of the machines is not known, the controllers and software are used elsewhere to manufacture parts for missiles as well as centrifuges used to make enriched uranium.

“These goods were supplied to Shenyang Machine Tools under the condition that they would not be retransferred to North Korea or other sanctioned states,” said the report, set to be released this week. European officials “decided to investigate the responsible individuals in the Shenyang company but this effort failed,” the document said. Shenyang officials would later claim that the transfer of sensitive technology had been inadvertent, the report said.

David Albright, author of the report and a former U.N. weapons inspector, declined to identify the European manufacturer or the government that conducted the investigation, citing confidentiality agreements. The Shenyang firm did not respond to emailed requests from The Washington Post seeking comment.

Albright, the author of dozens of technical studies on North Korea’s weapons programs, noted that China has made a show of prosecuting other businesses that violate sanctions on trading with North Korea. But he said the Shenyang case illustrates that illicit trade continues, often under complex schemes that are difficult even for Chinese authorities to spot.

[Navy sends strike group toward Korean Peninsula]

But he argued that the Chinese could do much more.

“It’s a question of priorities,” said Albright, who has discussed such cases with Chinese officials. “China is an export economy and money is never a dirty word, ever. There are good people in the system who would like to do more, but as you work your way down through the bureaucracy, the interest goes way down.”

There are signs that Beijing is beginning to tighten the screws. In September, Chinese authorities arrested at least 11 business executives in the border city of Dandong for allegedly selling banned goods to North Korea. Among those arrested was Ma Xiaohong, the 44-year-old founder and chairwoman of Hongxiang Group, a company accused by U.S. officials of supplying Pyongyang with rare metals and chemicals used in nuclear-weapons production. China also recently curtailed coal imports from North Korea and imposed unilateral sanctions intended to pressure Kim Jong Un into halting further nuclear tests.

In public comments after the Ma arrest, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said his country would be “relentless” in enforcing sanctions aimed at ridding the Korean Peninsula of nuclear weapons.

“These efforts are there for all to see,” Lu said.

During last week’s presidential visit, Trump administration officials urged President Xi to do still more. At a news conference on Thursday, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called on China to join in a “new strategy to end North Korea’s reckless behavior.”

The same message has been delivered privately as part of a pressure campaign that dates at least to the early years of the Obama administration. In meetings, U.S. officials have warned that a failure to halt the illicit trade could speed up Kim Jong Un’s nuclear timetable and increase the risk of a regional war — one that could devastate regional economies and send waves of refugees streaming across China’s border — an outcome Chinese leaders are particularly anxious to avoid, according to a recently retired U.S. diplomat and veteran of numerous rounds of such talks.

“China may be willing to close its eyes to some things,” the diplomat said, “but they’re not prepared to welcome North Korea as a nuclear-weapons state.”

Read more:

North Korea says Syria strikes prove its nuclear program is justified

Opinion: Responsible nuclear negotiations haven’t yet been tried

Tillerson: All options ‘on the table’ for North Korea