Stories by Seth Arenstein

We know that we should eat healthier and exercise more, but the vast majority of us do not. New surveys show people lack trust in Facebook’s handling of their personal information. Does this mean they’ll no longer use it as much? And what does a reduction in trust mean for a brand? We tackle these and other questions.

How do you grow an audience? In social media you post content to raise brand awareness. Kylie Cosmetics, Kylie Jenner’s company, writes its own rules. It increased the amount of content on its site by 1 percent from 2016 to 2017. It grew its audience 129%.

Our weekly roundup of news, trends and personnel moves in the world of communications and marketing. This week’s stories feature Weber Shandwick’s price for its work in the Michigan State U.-Larry Nassar situation, two PR pros tell us how to approach the data-savvy newsroom and Showtime Networks get a new SVP for entertainment publicity.

A perusal of the just-released Monmouth University poll illustrates one of the reasons why trust and reputation are declining among brands, governments, organizations and their leaders. Fake news often is seen as a major catalyst for this ebb of reputation. Unfortunately it appears fake news–defined correctly or not–continues to grow in the mind of the public.

The Selfie Generation is a difficult moniker for Millennials to be proud of. A new study from Fuse Media could help. It argues that Millennials are far more interested in values, diversity and societal issues than they appear to be. And while they are more comfortable with social media than older generations, their dependance on communications technology is highly overrated.

We’ve seen it before but it never seems to lose its irony: A brand built on something turns out to be in short supply of it. The British arm of KFC recently ran out of chicken. Built on collecting and protecting sensitive financial data, Equifax turned out to be clueless when handling customers’ confidential information. And Facebook, which espouses “meaningful social interactions,” has leaders who have been slow to talk about its biggest crisis yet.

Our weekly roundup of news, trends and personnel moves in communications and marketing. This week’s stories include Google’s transparency on fake content is something Facebook should consider, a slap from Google at Amazon, Wells Fargo offers its CEO a large increase, Theranos’ Holmes gets off easy and Chipotle’s chief marketer is out.

With the March for Our Lives set for Saturday at venues around the country, what should brands be doing, if anything, to prepare? We asked Barie Carmichael , a senior counselor at APCO Worldwide and a former communicator at iconic brands. In sum, it’s a delicate dance and one size does not fit all.

The Global RepTrak 100, the gold standard of corporate reputation, shows corporate reputation declining for the first time since 2009. Why has it declined and what can brands do about it? We answer those questions and more in our coverage.

In a new survey small businesses, those with fewer than 500 employees, are shown to be fairly large proponents of SEO. Some 55% of small businesses surveyed said they use SEO, a slight increase from 2017. More than 90% said last year they would be using SEO, according to Clutch, a B2B researcher.