Archive: January 2018

YouTube is trying to manage the tide of the troubling Tide Pod Challenge, deleting posts of users eating the colorful detergent packets, in the latest black eye for the platform. While the trend has prompted Tide’s parent company, Procter & Gamble, to mount a public service campaign, it also underscores YouTube’s challenges in governing its content and addressing advertiser concerns.

Building a dashboard seems easy enough. Make sure it presents relevant metrics and tracks your path toward success. A former communications executive at a major U.S. bank, Peter Osborne explains how it’s a bit more complicated. He also provides step-by-step instructions so you can create a dashboard that links communications metrics to relevant business goals.

If you’re in the market for a new job in communications, assume that anybody you might be meeting for an interview once made the mistake of hiring somebody without having given that person a writing test (it’s a mistake you make just once). Expect to be asked to take a writing test, and take these four tips to heart.

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?

In an effort to combat harmful advertising in the beauty industry, CVS has made a commitment to keep it real. The retail chain has unveiled its Beauty Mark campaign, promising that it will no longer “digitally alter or change a person’s shape, size, proportion, skin or eye color or enhance or alter lines, wrinkles or other individual characteristics” in the imagery it creates for its stores and marketing.

The Consumer Electronics Show is already a loaded PR coin. On one side there’s the opportunity to amplify messaging to hundreds of thousands of attendees and an exponential audience tuning in to media coverage. On the other is the challenge of rising above the throng, which this year includes a 146-inch TV and laundry-folding bots. Stir in some torrential rainstorms, power outages and grumpy attendees, and we’ve got a good list of challenges and takeaways from this year’s spectacle.

Katie Paine takes a look at what’s ahead in 2018 and sees a sobering return to reality, with more realistic measurement leading the charge. She also sees more bots in our future as well as fewer choices for those companies seeking help with measurement.

Our weekly roundup of news, trends and personnel moves in the world of communications, marketing and PR. This week we have stories about President Trump’s awards for the awful media, and journalism’s response, France’s attempt to legislate away fake news, Facebook’s algorithm changes and Univision’s Jennifer Ball has a new job.

In our review last week of most-engaged B2C brands for 2017 ( PRN , January 9, 2017), we saw a tremendous surge of consumer engagement, or actions, with video. This week, we’ll see that consumer engagement with social posts from B2B brands were somewhat similar.

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.