Stories by Justin Joffe

This could have easily have been a moment of crisis for JUUL Labs, manufacturers of the eponymous JUUL e-cigarette vaporizer, after The New York Times published a lengthy investigative report Monday detailing the company’s history of marketing its sleek, easy-to-use vaporizer to underage consumers. Instead, the fact that nothing nuclear happened to JUUL Labs this morning is a testament to the brand’s “proactive, not reactive” approach to reputation management.

Though VR and AR have become much more ubiquitous over the last three years, most businesses are still reticent to dive in. Last week, eMarketer shared infographics culled from a Harvard Business Review study in March 2018 that found while roughly two-thirds of U.S. executives polled claimed to be exploring the use of mixed reality (MR) technology, only 20% said they are “currently in production or deploying MR.”

While presenting the award for Video of the Year, Madonna took the opportunity to deliver a lengthy speech about how her career was inadvertently started by the late singer and undisputed Queen of Soul Aretha Franklin, who died the Thursday prior. Reactions to the speech were overwhelmingly negative, with amateur and professional critics alike voicing their belief that Madonna disrespected Aretha by making the speech largely about Madonna, relegating Aretha’s influence to nothing but a footnote in Madonna’s story of her own rise to stardom.

It’s through listening to the data, selecting your audiences carefully, experimenting and not being afraid to fail that social communicators can figure out what actually matters for them.

Effective and efficient networking presents a paradox that evokes the core skills of communications: how do you present yourself in a manner that’s quick, authentic, and accurately conveys everything about you without coming off as pure elevator pitch or spiel?

This past July, Twitter released its Q2 earnings in a letter to shareholders, offering a mostly positive outlook for brands with followers on the platform. Aside from a dip in stock prices after the platform conducted a massive purge of automated bots earlier in the month, and a 19% decline in shares—the platform’s biggest dip since October 2016—the rest of the earnings report is good news for communicators who invest resources in Twitter campaigns.

If you’ve watched a television show on-demand or streamed a popular YouTube video over the last few years, you’ve also likely been prompted to interact with a video ad. Given that engagement is a far more telling insight than mere views, the benefits of having your audience interact with your content are numerous. Interactive content generates four to five times more page views than static content according to LinkedIn, thus facilitating the first, and one of the most challenging, steps in the customer journey—engagement.

Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, has released a policy paper proposing 20 different paths toward social media regulation. In the paper, Warner divides his proposals into three categories: combating disinformation, protecting user privacy and promoting competition in the tech space. Here’s what the paper’s key points mean for communicators.

PayPal’s director of global corporate communications Amanda Miller cautions the next generation of PR professionals to realize that visuals, owned media and social are just a piece in an ecosystem that should include earned media, too.

Confidentiality is paramount to professional communicators, and while embargoes are hard to enforce, Google’s new “Confidential mode” positions Gmail as a top tier security safeguard. The problem with these new security features, says leading digital digital privacy nonprofit The Electronic Frontier Foundation, is that they offer users brittle security measures that can easily be breached.