Stories by Hayley Jennings

CEO turnovers are becoming an increasingly common occurrence in the business world. From a messaging standpoint, what’s most important when it comes to leadership changes is how the news is communicated to stakeholders, especially to internal employees. Change can be scary, and it is crucial to ensure the company’s workforce understands what’s going on, how it will impact them and the organization as a whole and how the transition process will take effect.

Following a report based on leaked internal Google documents about plans to launch a censored version of the search engine in China, some Google employees are less than impressed. The project (code named Dragonfly in confidential documents) was started in the spring of 2017 and had been confidential within the company, save for a small portion of Google’s large, multinational workforce, until this week.

If you’re overwhelmed with the number of analytics tools available on the market for communicators, you’re not alone. Between free options like Google Analytics, paid platforms like Meltwater and Adobe, and native analytics on social media sites, it can be a challenge to determine where to look to find the data that’s important to your team and company. Especially if it turns out that the metrics you need can’t all be found in one place. But, if utilized correctly, this can be a boon rather than a burden.

Google Analytics is one of the most accessible measurement tools out there today, due in large part to the fact that it’s free to use for anyone with a website and a Google account. But chances are you’re not using it as efficiently as possible to glean important insights from your communications efforts. Paul Headley, director of digital strategy and analytics at ZOG Digital, explains that Google Analytics is more customizable than many people understand, and if used properly it can show you the insights you need without the noise of unimportant data to you and your team.

As the PR industry looks forward into the next few years, PR pros are being advised to move away from old-school metrics like ad-value equivalencies (AVEs) and impressions. But what should communicators focus on instead? According to Renee Spurlin, vice president of analytics and digital marketing at ARPR, personas and customer journey mapping are the metrics of the future, and all PR goals should be in alignment with them.

Facebook, Twitter, Google and Microsoft announced a new program called the Data Transfer Project (DTP), an initiative to “create an open-source, service-to-service data portability platform so that all individuals across the web could easily move their data between online service providers whenever they want.”

Though many don’t realize it, SEO is influenced by every department that touches digital content in a given organization. While you don’t have to be a technical genius to understand how that impacts your marketing and communications efforts, it’s important to be aware that even if you hand off SEO to your resident SEO expert or to an agency, your actions with your brand’s digital content are already affecting your search rankings.

It is better to play offense than defense. Don’t wait until you and your team are asked to prove your value to the business. Start a measurement program now so that when the inevitable happens and the C-suite wants proof of communication’s contributions to the organization, you’ve already got it in hand.

Not all crises are created equal, and thus a crisis plan that was effective for one situation may not work well for another. Given how quickly new technologies emerge, news travels and opinions of communications strategies change in 2018, a plan that was crafted five years ago may be woefully out of date for a current crisis. As such, regular evaluation of your crisis strategy is crucial for success during a stressful time.

Twitter has deleted more than 70 million accounts engaging in suspicious and “trolling” behavior throughout May and June, and shows no sign of slowing down in July. This should make the platform more trusted by users and brands, but the effects on its stock price and opportunities for user growth are up in the air.