Archive: July 2016

Cash-flush companies typically more interested in settling lawsuits than pursuing lengthy and costly litigation are easy targets in today’s business world. This is exactly why it is crucial for companies like Nintendo to develop and put in place a dedicated crisis response strategy addressing all of the potential PR crises that may result from their products.

So here you are: You’ve landed your dream summer internship. Look at you! Being an ambitious, forward-thinking go-getter, you’re already wondering how to convert it into a full-time job. We were in your shoes not long ago. Below are the most important things we did as interns to land full-time gigs. To add perspective, we’ve invited our boss, Becky Boles, to add her thoughts on what it takes to get hired by a major communications firm.

The root cause of most scandals is institutional belief in infallibility. For the Catholic Church, papal decree established it in 1870, and as the award-winning movie Spotlight so clearly illustrated, it is still a part of the Church’s culture. For politicians, winning elections seems to convince them that they can get away with anything (think John Edwards and Mark “hiking the Appalachian trail” Sanford). In corporations it generally comes from a narcissistic CEO. We’ve noted this corollary in numerous columns: the more ego-driven the leader, the more likely the corporation is to suffer a PR crisis.

When negative news, such as a recall or a possible E. coli outbreak, hits the headlines, how should brand communicators handle it? And since most PR News Pro readers are outside the food sector, let’s broaden the discussion: How should communicators react when negative items about their brand make news? We’ll use food as a jumping-off point. The tactics and strategies we’ll cover apply to most sectors.

In case you hadn’t realized, video is no longer a fad. It has become a fait accompli. As we’ve seen in this series, which has examined Shareablee data made available exclusively to PR News, consumer engagement with U.S. brands—B2C and B2B—on social media in Q1 2016 has grown year over year. Tremendous increases in consumer engagement with video posts have powered the bulk of the growth. Consumer engagement, or actions, is defined as the sum of retweets and likes. The same pattern seen with B2C and B2B ( PRN, July 11) holds true for nonprofits, the subject of this week’s Data Dive. In Q1 2016, U.S. nonprofits generated 5.3 million actions on Twitter, a 49% improvement compared with the same time last year. A 125% increase in engagement with video content on the platform was responsible for the growth. Actions rose 49%, from 3.56 million to 5.3 million.

There are myriad lessons for communicators related to transparency, monitoring the social conversation and when and whom to engage from two recent news items. The first item has the Republican Party being forced to shut down its live chat on YouTube July 18. The party had urged viewers to chat while it streamed its convention live on YouTube. The reason for the shut-down were anti-Semitic comments posted on the live chat as former Hawaii governor Linda Lingle was addressing the convention. The other involves the nasty messages sent via social to actor/comedian Leslie Jones, a co-star of Ghostbusters.

Polarization is deeply embedded in the American psyche, a reality brands must accept and deal with. It affects them beyond the hot-button political issues of the day—immigration, race, gender identity, climate change, for instance—that they have to either tiptoe around or address head-on. The polarization affects the way our minds now function and speaks to the question of how to convince the undecided of anything when, for so many of us, our minds are already made up.

In today’s rapid-fire social media climate, it’s important for PR pros to watch for signals that forecast the next social media platform to take off and grow exponentially with users. With that in mind, we asked you, as top communicators and public relations strategists, to predict the next social media platform that’s going to explode in popularity and user growth.

Owned content of an app, video library, article or visual is difficult for anyone to grab true exposure for, and native is still a game for those with the most money. Rarely spoken of is the power of distributing branded content via earned media in a way that is actually scalable and measurable.

By 2018, 3.6 billion people—90% of the world’s internet-enabled population—will be registered to use at least one messaging app, according to Activate, a strategy and technology consultancy. Facebook would like to have its Messenger app on each of those 3.6 billion devices, and it may get there. The company has just announced that 1 billion people globally use Messenger every month.