Stories by Seth Arenstein

Mention the crisis FEMA is dealing with at the moment and most people probably think you’re referring to the agency’s work to assist residents of the Carolinas as they battle flooding from Hurricane Florence. Instead you could be thinking of the travel scandal challenging FEMA administrator Brock Long. Part of Long’s problem is a PR issue: the government administrator brand is tainted.

Several principles of PR and crisis communications can be applied to the situation involving Judge Brett Kavanaugh and his accuser, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. Now that Dr. Ford has identified herself, the issue has moved from the Senate to the court of public opinion, a venue where facts and legal arguments are sometimes immaterial. In this court, public perception is king.

It may be difficult to separate personal feelings from professional ones when considering the story of Stephen Bannon, the former Trump White House strategist, being dis-invited to appear at the New Yorker Festival next month. Nevertheless, the incident provides several timely lessons for communicators in these uncertain times.

For many communicators, September is the traditional kick-off for budget season. With this in mind, we departed from our usual roundtable format of a single question and asked senior communicators to discuss budget best practices and budget priorities and expectations for 2019.

A new study from PR News and Dataminr finds nearly 40% of PR professionals lack immediate access to breaking information. Roughly the same percentage admits developments about their brand caught them off-guard.

A few years ago it seemed breaking down silos between sales and marketing was one of the hot topics in PR. In a way, reducing silos also can be used to build an SEO team, as Randy Hui of the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network argues. But don’t forget the importance of education, he adds.

Plenty of brands use video to disseminate their messages and raise awareness. But how do you do this when the primary parts of your message are almost invisible to the public? That was one of the issues facing the Canadian Society for Medical Laboratory Science, which represents lab professionals.

Each month we ask communicators to turn over their toolkits and tell us what falls out. In other words, What tools and technologies are most effective to have when doing your job? We also ask

There have been a slew of PR crises this summer, so we asked Hill + Knowlton head of crisis/risk Kevin Elliott and kglobal crisis SVP Scott Sobel for their take on several: the response to the PA Grand Jury report; Les Moonves and CBS; MoviePass; Elon Musk: and the death of Jordan McNair, a football player at the University of Maryland. While Elliott and Sobel agree on the importance of a rapid response and transparency, the particulars of the responses and tactics in the various crises divided these experts in several cases.

Admit it, PR measurement has a PR problem. It’s particularly bad because some communicators resist working with data. Yet communications’ reliance on data is growing. The good news is data expert John Glinski of Vanguard says communicators need not be data experts to garner answers with data to important questions.