PR Insiders

Unfortunately for proud PR practitioners everywhere, the facilitator of the June 2016 meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, Rob Goldstone, is being described in the media as a “PR exec.”

PR pros often hear the phrase, “Think like a journalist.” Sometimes they even need to work as journalists, particularly when they are interviewing brand executives or clients in search of an interesting item that can eventually be pitched to a reporter. It’s your job to move beyond the collection of facts and dry, memorized answers executives often provide. Here are tips to get interviewees to offer emotion and other insights so that the result will be an interesting story. After that you’ll be ready to pitch it to journalists.

Many job interviews end with the interviewer asking the candidate if he/she has questions. It’s best to use this opportunity to obtain important information. Topics to inquire about include the company’s culture, its salary/promotion review process and the structure of its work environment. After all, this is the time to figure out if the company is the right fit for you. On the other side of the table the interviewer is deciding if you will be a good employee.

Here’s one question you don’t want to be asked by a brand representative when you’re trying to resolve an ongoing issue: “Who did you speak to the last time you tried to resolve this?” Once… Continued

Stockholders might literally own a brand, but employees—from the C-suite to the customer-service level—are the brand. This sense of unity and shared responsibility needs to be communicated up and down the line, over and over again. At the very least, basic kindness will take root in an organization—not a bad trait to have while the world hungers for the next trending story.

July is the six-month mark of the year, so it’s natural for forecasters to talk about trends to watch in the final half of the calendar. Our not-so-fearless prognosticator and blogger spent some of his July 4th thinking about what’s to come in PR and communications during the rest of 2017. Among the topics covered are AVEs, social media, storytelling, video, brand reputation, cyber and healthcare PR.

When I ask my friends in PR what they’d do with a bigger budget, their first instinct is to smile that “yeah, right!” smile. It’s hard enough to keep the budget they have much less… Continued

We asked thousands of communicators via PR News’ social platforms what they would do if they had an extra $250,000 in their budget. The answers were telling: while “more staff and training” was the #1 answer again, a few other ideas took on some weight, influencer relations and video being two of them.

Looked at clinically, we know that the president’s communications skills can’t help but influence the tone of civic discourse online and, to a lesser degree, in person. Individuals and organizations must swim in, navigate and adapt to these incivil waters.

President Trump’s June 29 tweets about “Morning Joe” hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough have generated plenty of outrage in the professional media, on social channels and in home kitchens across the land. In his tweets, the president, fed up with the MSNBC morning news show’s critical coverage of his administration, went easy on Scarborough… Continued

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