Stories by Rich Thomaselli

Podcasts have been a runaway success for businesses looking to further engage their audience. From their mobility to their relative brevity to their status as (mostly) free to users, podcasts are pulling in new listeners on a daily basis. Here are four key considerations when getting yours started.

Kristin Thomas is the program manager for investment management company Vanguard’s employee advocacy efforts on social media, which, within a regulated industry, isn’t always the easiest task. Thomas, who is speaking at The Social Shake-Up May 6-8 in Atlanta, shares lessons learned from launching employee advocacy at Vanguard.

Who among us hasn’t had the calendar alarm go off and been filled with existential dread? Meetings, while necessary, can often drain employees, waste time and leave participants feeling bored. It’s time to shake up the model and make your meetings more productive—even exciting. Here are five ideas to help.

The art and science of media monitoring has been around in one shape or another for more than a century. While it may have been a nice competitive advantage when practitioners were cutting and pasting newspaper clippings, today it’s a requirement. Here are three essential considerations.

There are new best practices, new ideas and innovative ways to spread messages, with the landscape shifting and evolving every day. Things move so quickly that reading blogs is an essential way to keep up on the dynamic industry of public relations and communications—even the most seasoned professionals will undoubtedly learn something new.

Injecting Reddit into a communications plan may seem like a death wish. Why would any company jump onto a platform notorious for embodying the worst of social media? And yet, it may well be time to wake up and take notice. According to Alexa, users spend more minutes per day on Reddit than any of the other top fifty sites.

Could you ever imagine likening a cross-department crisis management unit to a basketball team? Here’s how KFC’s Tori Carter sees it: a coach at the top, to draft players and call the shots; everyone on the bench ready to go in; and the players on the court, determined by their specialty and the game situation.

You can now find and reach almost anyone through social media, making it a quick and easy way to pitch. But should you? Likely, you’ll succeed only if you’re working on an important story that’s on a journalist’s beat. Here are some tips for getting it right.

Without a clear understanding of why you measure, you may need to break with the past and start anew. That’s what we call “clean slate public relations.”

Here are a dozen words or phrases to avoid, words and phrases that tend to turn off recipients of a press release—ultimately relegating your pitch to the unenviable circular file.