Archive: April 2017

When brands communicate on social media, there’s a built-in trust and understanding gap between professional communicators and a skeptical public. Finding a way to bridge that gap is crucial. Nation Hahn, digital director at Blueprint for Athletes and chief growth officer at EdNC.org, has found that for the right brand and the right campaign, a great way to make the connection is by working with third-party ambassadors to intertwine the brand’s story with the stories of real people.

Few companies are trying to make a Starbucks-like statement in today’s highly politicized communication environment. Many brands want to respect the diverse opinions of their employees and customers and avoid becoming a target of unanticipated backlash. Here are a few ways communicators can help brands navigate today’s highly charged environment. Fortunately, most of them are basic tenets of PR and communications. Brushing up on the basics can be especially useful in today’s climate.

Something we’ve observed at PR News in recent years: We don’t see “PR” in job titles quite as often as we used to. One reason may be that so few communicators today are restricted to traditional PR functions like media relations and crisis management. In 2017 they are tasked with so much more, from content creation and social media management to email marketing and brand development.

Before she measures the success of any campaign, January Williams begins with the question, “What am I asking the audience to do?” Williams, the director of online communications and outreach for the nonprofit Children’s Defense Fund (CDF), doesn’t try to be all things on all platforms. While some initiatives, like increasing the CDF’s number of followers, are easy to measure, most of what the organization does—when issuing legislative calls to action or fundraising, for example—is all about engagement. Here are three ways she uses analytics to drive action.

Right or wrong, media is in the crosshairs. The White House targets the press regularly. Distrust of the press is rising, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer and journalists themselves feel the struggle to maintain the public trust, a new report from Cision says. With media in a precarious state, Starbucks’ SVP, global communications & international public affairs Corey duBrowa believes it’s important for brands to have an alternative and create content themselves. He discussed this during the Arthur W. Page Society’s New CCO podcast. In an in-depth interview with us after the podcast, we asked duBrowa about branded content, storytelling, integration and challenges ahead.

There were many examples last month of organizations screwing up and resulting in crises badly handled. We could have piled on PwC for the Oscars, but given that Hollywood obsessed about it for weeks, it was hard to find much more to say. And of course, we would have loved to weigh in on the great leggings-on-United kerfuffle clinging to Twitter as, well, leggings do. But frankly, in these times, all that seemed trivial compared to a couple of serious crises plaguing America’s military.

Our regular feature where we ask communicators about trends in PR. This week we speak with veteran cable TV communicator Anne Cowan. “I think demand for transparency is trending. It’s probably been driven in part by the political climate of the last several months. But I think the demand for transparency was occurring before that time, just a bit more slowly. Kim Scott, a CEO coach and former faculty member at Apple University, has written a book that espouses transparency in management, although she calls it radical candor, which also is the name of her book. I love that term.”

When a massive, five-alarm fire broke out on a Saturday evening in busy Gilbert, Arizona, a Phoenix suburb home to nearly 250,000 residents, the Gilbert Fire and Rescue Department partnered with Gilbert’s Digital Communications Department to take a teamwork and technology approach to communication and community outreach. Here’s how they did it.

Our weekly roundup of trends, news and personnel moves in PR & communications. This week we feature stories about Uber’s latest issue, new moves from Twitter, a new VP of communications for Univision and brief obits for PR pioneers Pam Edstrom and Gershon Kekst.