Stories by Kiana Montgomery

More and more businesses are reacting to consumer demand to become environmentally aware. As a result, 2020 might go down as the year when CSR activities became table stakes for corporate America. Here are five quick ways communicators can help their companies get on board the CSR train.

Once again, Major League Baseball finds itself tangled in the details of a cheating scandal. Unlike the steroids era of the 1990s, where Congress held MLB accountable, we now find the sport policing itself, holding its own teams accountable. Is this the correct route in terms of PR and reputation?

Sure, Twitter has a relatively new 280-character limit. But just because Twitter doubled its 140-character limit doesn’t mean you should use all of them. So what’s the ideal length of a tweet? A hashtag? How else can you make your tweets more readable and engaging? Let’s look at the research.

CES 2020 is in the books, but its implications will spread throughout the year. That will be the case for communicators, who saw plenty of opportunities to help new-age tech explain itself to the public. One of the big takeaways, and one likely to provide lots of work for communicators, is that technology has broken out and will be foundational to life, several communicators say.

Every company and organization should have an up-to-date crisis plan. In addition, holding periodic crisis simulations and post-simulation analyses are important. Still, one of the keys to crisis management, and one that’s often overlooked, might be the personalities sitting around the table in the C-suite. And don’t forget the corporate politics involved, argues Jim Lindheim, a former Burson-Marsteller chairman.

It’s not easy to admit that your communications effort is not all it could be. Sometimes the culprit is failing to keep up with communications technology. It takes courage to admit you’re behind. Funds and teamwork are need to catch up. Here’s how Cleveland Clinic’s PR team remedied the situation it found itself in a few years back.

It’s 2020 and everyone is making predictions. But as that well-known PR pro Yogi Berra said, Making predictions is hard, especially when it comes to the future. Everything about SEO is going to change, right? Maybe, maybe not. There are SEO changes to be aware of, but the basic advice remains. You can’t game Google and its algorithms, so don’t try. Instead, create a valuable experience for users.

The secret behind grabbing your target market’s interest lies in understanding how they search for and discover information on your brand. Keyword research provides data-supported answers to questions about popular search trends and the ways people prefer to consume content. These answers open doors to shape content through the mind of a consumer.

As the new year starts and content planning begins in earnest, marketers should be on the lookout for the next big moments in social. Lucky for the marketing community, the team behind social media management tool Hootsuite has released a list of what they deem to be the most likely social media trends in 2020, following a survey of over 3,000 marketers. Their top picks included personalized messaging, bold political statements and the continuing rise of TikTok as a platform giant, among others.

Where is PR heading over the next year? When new crises see brands falling into the same old mistakes, and tone-deaf messaging makes you look back at your calendar to double check the year, it sometimes seems that communications isn’t innovating fast enough. But take a closer look at the new tools, applications and multi-channel campaigns being dreamed up by the most impressive brands and agencies in our field. Innovation is clearly happening—and gazing ahead into the new year indeed brings much to look forward to.