Stories by Justin Joffe

Digital platforms are constantly rolling out new products and services to improve the user experience, but seldom do those new features consider the user’s experience off the platform. That’s where Pinterest, a social platform that organizes images on a digital corkboard, has broken new ground. Yesterday, its product team announced “an entirely new experience centered around emotional wellbeing,” reports Wired. “When you type in an anxiety-related query—something like ‘work anxiety,’ or ‘dealing with stress’—Pinterest will now display a box above the stream of pins.”

Yesterday, Bloomberg cited a 2018 Pew Research Center study that found YouTube to be the most popular online platform among those in rural America—at 59 percent—drawing more eyes than Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and more. This trend comes bundled with some strong takeaways for communicators about why how-to, service-oriented content always does well and why YouTube is a more powerful platform for engagement than many PR Pros realize.

PRNEWS has learned that, as the story of Ogilvy’s work with the Customs and Border Patrol broke, its Mexico division is also winning awards for work with clients like the Refugee Nation Olympic team and AeroMexico, whose primary advertising campaign criticizes President Trump’s immigration policies.

So, the White House plans to host its first ever social media conference this Thursday. But Facebook or Twitter have not been invited. What does a social media summit look like without two of the biggest platforms participating? And who’s going to this thing, anyway? The White House has been mum. But based on what we do know, we take look at what might be discussed.

Facebook thinks that Libra will incentivize small businesses to transact more on the platform. In turn, this will create economic growth and allow Facebook to garner more ad revenue. Today, however, the federal government officially said “not so fast.” The U.S. House Committee on Financial Services published a letter addressed to Facebook that calls on the social network to halt its cryptocurrency plans.

Nike has doubled-down on its relationship with Kaepernick by taking his advice and deciding to pull the release of its limited Air Max 1 Quick Strike Fourth of July shoe, which was to be released this week to commemorate Independence Day. For communicators wondering what a true spokesperson partnership should look like, here are some teachable takeaways.

Every fall in NYC, PR News celebrates the agencies with exceptional campaigns at our Agency Elite Awards, which benchmark excellence in PR agencies’ key practice areas, from advocacy, crisis communications and social media to internal communications, media relations and reputation management. As we head into judging phase for this year’s awards on November 20th, let’s look back at some of last year’s highlights.

Putting Facebook’s problems with inconsistent messaging aside, the “platform vs. publisher” debate has considerable relevance for PR pros, whose success in Media Relations largely depends on building out some variation of a PESO strategy that involves a traditional ad spend, an earned media component, solid SEO and robust owned content delivery channels. Communicators are in a position to become influencers of Facebook’s policy, not just through their partnerships with marketing and ad spends, but by treating the ubiquitous social network as a “publication” and not a “platform.” Here’s why.

Last week, PETA tweeted a picture of a character from the next installment in the upcoming “Pokémon” video game series, a sheep pokémon named Wooloo. Suffice to say, video game fans weren’t having it. There’s much that communicators can learn from this bizarre campaign, including how to engage your detractors on socials in a constructive way along with when not to jump on a trending news story just for engagement.

Under the banner of “Bringing Peace, Love & Music Back to the Planet,” Woodstock 50 “will give generations of fans the opportunity to join together in the festival’s foundational intent of harmony and compassion.” After delayed ticket sales, deflection, a bailing investor and a court order, we ask: is this the right way to brand utopia?