PR Insiders

Brand communicators can’t afford to lock away their smartphones for three-hour chunks during workweeks, however you define a workweek. They’re paid to stay connected, monitor brand sentiment, protect and enhance their brand’s or their clients’ reputations. Yet the requirements of their jobs put them at risk of addiction to digital devices.

From phony click-bait news sites, to unqualified sources to falsified stories, fake news, however you define it, is a threat to the PR industry. If our job is to ethically persuade public opinion by working with credible media, it follows that it’s vital that the public’s trust in a free press not be eroded. To go a step further, if the practice of PR is going to survive, good journalism must thrive. For that reason, it is critical that PR pros be more accountable than ever for their work.

This was supposed to be a blog about another topic entirely. Yet the news we received late last night prompted a different blog. To set the scene: Your blogger had just returned from visiting a… Continued

This was supposed to be a blog about another topic entirely. Yet the news we received late last night from a PR contact has prompted a different blog. To set the scene: your blogger had just returned from visiting a friend, hospitalized early Monday with an asthma attack that turned out to be heart trouble, which resulted in a triple bypass. Then, as your blogger sat down to finish writing the blog that should have been here, we received word from a PR friend that Anne Glauber, subject of a blog posted on this site months ago passed, aged 60, after a three-year battle with pancreatic cancer.

Change is a constant, and PR pros can learn how to manage themselves and their teams, with the right knowledge. The author begins a how-to series to provide the foundation of change management from a communicator’s perspective, with engagement at its core. The techniques explained will be immediately useful to you, your brand and organization.

PR and communications teams increasingly are pressured to own their brand’s earned media space beyond their borders to keep up with – and stand uniquely apart from – competitors. This is becoming true for non-profits competing for donor dollars and has been a constant for the private sector. In this article you will find steps for building and increasing global earned media visibility for your brand.

Does a day pass during your life as a PR pro when you don’t need to write? For those of us who do a lot of writing – and that’s most of us – we will, at one time or another, face an insurmountable case of writer’s block. One day you’re at the top of your game, pounding out pitches, speeches, tweets and press releases like a high-powered printing press, and the next moment you’re struggling to find anything to write. It happens to all of us, but there are always ways to jump-start your creativity. Here are four tips for getting out of a creative rut.

In our personal and working lives, relationships get frayed; friends, colleagues, competitors and customers get angry at us. We have to decide when to just let things blow over, and when to reach out to the angry party. The same holds true for organizations. The only thing that’s different for organizations, perhaps, is today’s heightened political climate and the speed of news cycles.

“Not every incident needs a response, but incidents that are ignored can lead to a bigger crisis.” This crisis management advice comes directly from Ernest DelBuono, senior strategist for strategic communications firm Levick. At its… Continued

Imagine that a restaurant’s menu offers a delicious-looking entree of spaghetti, meatballs and red sauce. Wonderful. Well, sorry, but you are prohibited from ordering them together, on a single plate. Absurd, right? Sounds like a Seinfeld episode. That is the state of earned, paid and owned media. You can use PR for earned media, digital marketing or advertising for paid media, or content marketing for owned media. But mixing them? Blasphemy.