Archive: April 2016

In an April 27 interview with the Wall Street Journal, the Lego Group essentially blamed low-level employees for a crisis involving an artist’s request for a bulk order of its plastic blocks. Even if all this was the result of a misunderstanding by a customer service employee, is it good PR to focus on employee mistakes in the Wall Street Journal?

Measuring PR is a hot topic. Talk to any PR or marketing leader and they want to know which campaigns are paying off, which influencers and reporters are driving engagement, and if their agency retainer is bigger than their ROI.

The problem, of course, is that most leaders aren’t sure how to find those answers. The intention to measure PR accurately is there, but the ability often isn’t.

Finding and developing content stars among a brand’s employees and customers is something Southwest Airlines knows a little bit about. Brooks Thomas, who plays a key role in Southwest’s social content strategy, will be sharing how-to’s and some case study examples of his brand’s star-making process in his keynote presentation on June 6, 2016, at PR News’ Digital PR & Marketing Conference in Miami Beach. He offers some quick Southwest-style tips here to help you develop your own cast of content stars.

One of the most common questions communicators have upon getting into Snapchat is “How do I measure?” The lack of a native analytics platform or a web presence means that there simply isn’t a lot of data available, and what data there is has to be recorded manually. But there are still metrics that can inform the growth of your Snapchat strategy, as well as how effectively you’re engaging your audience.

Chobani founder and CEO Hamdi Ulukaya set a new standard for employee relations on April 26 when he gave the company’s more than 2,000 full-time employees an ownership stake in the massively popular yogurt brand. “I’ve built something I never thought would be such a success, but I cannot think of Chobani being built without all these people,” Ulukaya told the New York Times. “Now they’ll be working to build the company even more and building their future at the same time.”

Efforts to base public relations activity in sound measurement concepts could use a little extra PR. The originators of the Barcelona Principles have long hoped that their work would take root among communicators struggling to provide the organizational value of their work. So, what’s better PR than a shareable infographic?

Chick-fil-A wisely halted sales of its Chocolate Chunk Cookies when its supplier, CSM Bakery Solutions, informed it that the cookies contained a trace of peanuts in them. That’s in contrast to dietary information it supplies to customers at its restaurants and online that the cookies are peanut-free.

If you’re like most content publishers, you probably measure time spent on a page, a helpful adjustment to your basic bounce rate metric. Guess who else is paying attention to that? Facebook. In a recent blog post, the social media kingpin announced that they will update publishers’ rankings based on how much time users spend looking at an article in the Facebook mobile browser after clicking through from News Feed.

Behind the scenes, certain heroes have been meeting and debating about the standardization of PR measurement practices, and putting these practices to work and doing, yes, PR, for these practices. At PR News’ annual Measurement Conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., we inducted a few of these heroes into PR News’ Measurement Hall of Fame.

It’s impossible for PR pros to stack up against the cultural powerhouse that Beyoncé’s become over the years—when her messages get transmitted, all others get muffled. There are a few things, though, about Beyoncé’s marketing style that PR pros would be remiss to ignore.