Stories by Kaylee Hultgren

This week’s roundup looks at an IPR report on adapting to new media relations strategies, the Substack journalist trend and Kennedy Institute advice on messaging during an election season.

An Institute for Public Relations Webinar last week, titled “Al-Powered Answer Engines: Shifts in Digital Reputation Building,” panelists outlined five ways in which marketing and communications professionals can proactively manage digital brand reputation amid the shift brought about by AI-powered answer engines.

At the 2024 Meltwater Summit in New York City earlier this summer, Katie Stratakis, Head of Corporate Communications at Samsung Electronics America, shared the company’s approach to proactive brand storytelling and best practices for brand reputation management during crises.

PRNEWS’ final Digital Learning Series event, on Measurement and Data for PR, took place August 14. We caught up with panelist and measurement expert Katie Paine, CEO of Paine Publishing, to discuss the latest challenges, tactics and tools for measuring and evaluating reputation.

At the 2024 Meltwater Summit in New York City last month, Neil Cameron, Head of Canadian Agency Partnerships at TikTok, guided attendees through “six universal truths” for creating compelling, short-form video on the platform. Regardless of budget or bandwidth constraints, PR and marketing pros can leverage these principles when creating video content.

The blurring of lines between marketing and communications functions continues to be a top industry trend for 2024. To provide insight into how that plays out inside one of the world’s most well-known brands, PRNEWS spoke to Mastercard’s Chief Marketing and Communications Officer, Raja Rajamannar, on how the disciplines overlap, integrate and collaborate.

As the industry grapples with identifying and communicating the most effective metrics for demonstrating PR’s impact—which is increasingly tied to driving business outcomes—PR measurement remains in a state of flux. PRNEWS spoke with Carolina Calkins, Principal at Intelligent Relations, to discuss earned media metrics and the influence of AI on measurement.

An IPR webinar on March 6, featuring communications and business executives from Merck, healthcare agency Real Chemistry and reputation intelligence platform Maha Global, explored how corporate brand and reputation drives business outcomes. The conversation covered the challenges of measuring that reputation, tools, key KPIs and emerging issues in reputation management.

A Museum of PR Event on Feb. 18, titled “Celebrating Black PR History 2024: Where Are All the Black Men in PR,” hosted an intergenerational panel to discuss the issues facing Black men in PR today, strategies to attract more of them to the industry, and share their own experiences.

The Institute for Public Relations’ Measurement Commission held its first meeting of 2024 last week. Afterward, PRNEWS caught up with Commission head Olivia K. Fajardo, M.A., Director of Research at IRP, to identify and discuss the most pressing issues on the minds of the organization’s members.