Stories by Seth Arenstein

Did you know 74% of Americans order a takeout pizza or a delivery pizza at least once a month? We didn’t either, but DiGiorno did. And it also knew from social listening that last year 80% of posts about delivery pizza were not positive. That led to a pizza party, er, experiment.

While analysts are scrambling to digest Tuesday’s announcement from Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase about their new healthcare alliance, the PR perspective, at least at the outset, seems less complicated. It was a tremendous win for the trio of companies in terms of internal and external communications as well as reputation management.

It may be a long road ahead for Toys R Us, the iconic retailer that said it will be closing nearly 200 of its 800 stores beginning next month. The brand is in chapter 11, yet it intends to rebound. Internal communications best practices recommend treating departing and remaining employees with respect. For Toys R Us, which soon will have a lot of both kinds of employees, this lesson could be crucial.

The growth curve for Instagram will creep up steadily, powered by growth in developing nations as governments invest in bandwidth and better mobile phone plans are offered, a new report from eMarketer says.

It seemed that the Matt Lauer scandal was behind us now that the former star was gone and his replacement, Hoda Kotb, was installed in his anchor chair. In addition, Katie Couric said the ousted Lauer was “not the Matt we knew.” But this morning former Today Show anchor Ann Curry said the Lauer incident was not a surprise to her and that there was a culture of verbal abuse at NBC. Has the network really moved on from this scandal?

What did English-language users of Wikipedia search for in 2017? Were they seeking to escape reality with lots of searches for films and television? Or perhaps there was another explanation? Certainly this list of popular searches is open for interpretation, but winter is coming.

There are few topics in PR and communications that have generated more buzz than AI; of course, there’s been plenty of hype and false claims, too. Deloitte decided to try to separate the steak from the sizzle by talking to several hundred business executives who’ve already adopted AI and cognitive technologies.

PR pros know the importance of controlling the message. On Tuesday afternoon President Trump went far off script, allowing cameras to roll during an hour-long session where Republican and Democrat lawmakers negotiated about immigration issues, with the president overseeing the proceedings. The gamble worked, as it allowed Trump to appear presidential and in control, countering the image portrayed in a recent book about his administration’s first year. It’s an episode with lessons for communicators.

Many companies measure their reputation via a yearly poll. Others wait until a crisis hits to commission a survey about how stakeholders perceive their company. Still others feel measuring reputation should be an ongoing operation. This fourth article in our series with PublicRelay discusses the best ways to measure reputation and why it’s important to do so.

Communicators wonder if their messages resonate. You hope great content will impress, but human memory can be fickle. Memory also is far from infinite, the 16th Annual Most Memorable New Product Launch survey shows. What propelled the new iPhone to be the most memorable product launch of 2017?