Media Relations

PR pros now spend a lot of their time navigating the social media terrain. They post tweets, distribute pictures on Instagram and create six-second video clips for Vine. Whew. While those skills certainly hold value for communicators, they may not be the essential element for career advancement.

It’s a common mistake in PR: including executive quotes that derail the overall message and cause reporters to toss your press release into the circular file. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

In yet another new discipline to add to their wheelhouse, PR agencies are starting to get into the media buying space. PR News spoke with Matthew Browher,
 senior VP, digital strategist at Ketchum, who provided the following three tips for PR pros looking to adapt media buying practices.

Late last week, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s foundation, LeanIn.org, got some negative media coverage. An editor from the organization posted a call on her Facebook page for unpaid interns. The criticism was immediate and furious.… Continued

The U.S. recycling rate has been holding at a paltry 34% for the past few years, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. What’s more, recyclable materials that are worth billions of dollars are still ending up in landfills each year.

Whether it’s due to a lack of measurement tools, budgetary constraints or simple inertia, there is a disconnect between the rhetoric and the reality when it comes to how communicators can make better use of things live video, audio, animation, gamifiication, slideshows and infographics in their overall messaging.

I was at a PR News Conference a couple of weeks ago, and during a Q&A with a panel critiquing press inquiries, the question came up of when and how to follow-up with a non-responsive… Continued

It’s been a rough week for Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s LeanIn.org, a nonprofit “committed to offering women the ongoing inspiration and support to help them achieve their goals.”

What do The New York Times, the Huffington Post and Verizon Wireless all have in common? All three brands have moved from real-time communications to “live” broadcasting—through video.

When putting together a PR event or promotional stunt, communicators need to consider the law of unintended consequences. The folks at LG didn’t think about that, apparently, when they started a race in Seoul to grab smartphone vouchers hanging from helium balloons, resulting in 20 people being injured and seven sent to the hospital.