Archive: August 2016

As the pool of full-time journalists continues to wane, today’s PR professional has to spend increasing amounts of time writing pitches that stand out from the masses. And for all of that effort, when a story does get picked up by a major outlet, it’s buried by a constant stream of other stories—often without enough time for it to generate adequate impressions for the resources spent. Which begs the question: Is it still worth it for PR professionals to prioritize earned media, or should they pour all of their resources into newer media channels instead?

Your first inclination when hearing the story about Mylan and its EpiPen is to categorize it. Put it in a place alongside similar tales. That’s normal. It’s what the human brain does to make sense of incoming stimuli. The EpiPen saga seems like an easy one to handle. We who follow news of brands, particularly in the pharmaceutical space, have seen it before.

Facebook Offers, a way for brands to share discounts and promotions on Facebook, received a significant update on Aug. 30, according to a company blog post. The social behemoth optimized the service for mobile, while expanding tracking abilities and giving brands more ways to promote their coupons. Facebook now lets organizations create Offers that can be redeemed online or through an in-store purchase.

An infographic can be a great way to share your story—provided it’s the right story for the medium. As we know, there’s no silver bullet when it comes to info-delivery methods. You might feel that you have an intuitive sense of what’s appropriate for an infographic, and you may be right. But it’s helpful to think it through more thoroughly, and you owe it to your brand to do so.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, is a video worth a thousand more? There are 4.5 billion pieces of content shared every day. As we enter the fall season and move toward the end of 2016, the reign of video content will continue to dominate into next year. According to a recent report from Cisco, video content will be responsible for 85% of search traffic in the US alone by 2019.

There is a fine line between adopting a social issue and taking a position on something so controversial that it quickly escalates from good intention to crisis. While this piece is not intended to determine the rightness or wrongness of Kaepernick’s act, from a communications perspective, here are a few things that PR pros should consider if someone from your organization is preparing to make a political statement.

Clients that truly want to identify and hire the very best PR agency, whether for a short-term project or an ongoing contract, should undertake the same level of due diligence, review and evaluation as their human resources departments would put into the hiring of a new staff of public relations professionals—because that’s essentially what the new agency will bring to the organization.

No doubt, the Olympics was good for Instagram. We told you last week how Shareablee data provided exclusively to PR News Pro showed consumer actions, or engagement, with B2B brands grew 50% August 5-17. Actions are the total of consumer likes, comments, shares and retweets. B2B brands had 1.8 million actions; B2C had 213 million.

The Olympics is not for the faint of heart. Never mind the athletes. Being a spectator or a sponsor requires as much grit and fortitude. I know. I just got back from watching my cousin, Caleb Paine, compete on the U.S. Sailing Team. For years, I observed the Olympics from the comfort of my living room, watching the celebration of human spirit and athleticism play out against what I assumed was a perfectly orchestrated spectacle, replete with major brands and a lot of media coverage. It’s not like that at all.

To get readers in the right frame of mind for the start of the school term this two-part series begins by asking a bevy of veteran in-house and agency communicators to discuss the latest trends in the field and how they are being taught (or not) at colleges and graduate schools. Their responses are included in this week’s edition. In our next edition, we’ll present the academics’ responses to similar questions.