Stories by Seth Arenstein

Our weekly roundup of news, trends and personnel moves in communications and marketing. This week’s edition features stories about Kevin Spacey’s poorly crafted apology and Mark Halperin’s fairly good one. We also look at offensive art on a cereal box and a big personnel move on the agency side in Washington, D.C.

In this Slide of the Week, Kena Lewis, director, public affairs & media relations, Orlando Health, shares some of the crisis preparedness steps she and her team use. Regular drills keep the team sharp, she says, and a crisis communications plan, provided physically and electronically to each employee, contains, among other things, a list of phrases for support and safety that communicators can use to create statements without too much effort.

Brand communicators may be leaving much on the table if they fail to think strategically about how to leverage the ROI from events to provide content for marketing and sales. SAP’s Amisha Gandhi, who heads the brands work with influencers, provides a chart to show you how to do it.

The dark weather on Monday night in Boston was a perfect complement to some of the darker topics communicators need to wrestle with today, including dark social, rogue sites and hackers and executive terminations. Fortunately, good advice rained down on attendees as well.

The opening of PRSA’s International Conference featured a bevy of technology exhibitors, a plethora of PRSSA members and the wisdom of filmmaker and storyteller Morgan Spurlock. The super-sized presentation from Spurlock was highly entertaining and contained several good tips about content creation.

Our weekly look at trends, news and personnel moves in PR, marketing and communications. This week’s stories include Wells Fargo back on Capitol Hill; Equifax makes its maiden voyage to the Hill; the former Uber CEO makes a hill of trouble; and Southwest Airlines’s CCO Linda Rutherford climbs a hill.

President Trump’s use of the moniker “Rocket Man” to refer to the leader of North Korea, Kim Jong Un, was purely Trumpian communications. Like or hate the president’s politics (and yesterday’s speech), he has a way of using language that cuts through the clutter and gets people talking about subjects he’s passionate about. That’s similar to what communicators strive to do every day.

Influencers in Food and Finance bucked the trend in August, with modest consumer engagement gains for their posts on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram vs. July, according to data supplied to PR News by Shareablee. British chef Jamie Oliver led the Food category, while Robert Kiyosaki was the top influencer in the Finance category in August.

Size matters, particularly when it comes to social crises. In fact, large brands with extensive presences globally are very big targets for those with mobile phones, which is just about everyone. Walmart has absorbed its share of social crises this summer. Dan Kneeshaw, the brand’s senior director, global communications, digital strategy & brand engagement, provides insight on how Walmart views social crises.

Social media can seem like the Wild West. The rules continue to be written, and they change rapidly. Sometimes the amount of posted content correlates directly with the level of consumer engagement. In August, for example, relationships were direct, at least for Automotive and Fashion influencers, according to Shareablee data provided to us.