Stories by John Roderick

While many brands have invested heavily in owned-media, it’s not all rainbows and unicorns for PR teams looking to own the mantle of official corporate storytellers.

The discussion about how PR pros can get a “seat at the table” is a perennial issue. In many organizations there hasn’t been an expectation that PR could or even should drive business results. When you think like a C-suite executive about business value, you can creatively implement meaningful measurements that connect to the overall health of your organization.

The pace of change in the PR practice is expected to accelerate in 2015, as more and more communicators take on a strategic role for their companies and clients and online media channels claim an expanding share of marketing budgets. To help you plan for next year, we asked PR pros what they see on the road ahead.

Businesses large and small are starting to invest increasingly high percentages of their promotional budgets in social media. A consensus on just how this social media investment impacts their top- and bottom-line revenue continues to be elusive, however.

On a basic level, the only thing PR professionals really want to be is heard. There are a few ways stories can be heard above the noise, cut through the droves of useless information and make their way in front of the eyeballs of the target audience.

UCB, a top company in the neurological treatment market, and PR agency Cooney/Waters Group created Parkinson’s “More Than Motion” (MTM), an unbranded campaign designed to align awareness about the lesser known symptoms of Parkinson’s disease (PD)—such as difficulty sleeping and loss of taste and smell—with the goal of fostering an educational and supportive online community.

The latest stats from Gould+Partners show top-line net revenue increasing for most of the PR agencies responding to the survey, as “projects” start to perform better than monthly retainers.

Whether for internal or external audiences, putting information and tools into the palms of your customers’ or employees’ hands seems to be a requirement. But is an app the best solution?

In the drive to deepen stakeholder relationships, communicators continue to reengineer strategies to include more branded content as part of a paid-earned-owned media engagement strategy.

Linda Rutherford, who leads PR at Southwest Airlines, talks about how to motivate her communications team and the role of storytelling at the company.