Stories by Seth Arenstein

Creating a focus group sounds straightforward. Gather people, ask questions, listen. The Philadelphia Inquirer and Ryder offer deeper tips.

Michael O’Mara, Clyde Group’s first president/COO, tells us about his unusual path to PR. A product manager for years, O’Mara believes his experience as a client will be beneficial as he leads the D.C.-based communication agency.

We jumped at the chance of questioning Prosek’s new SVP Johnny Chavkin. One of his best tips is about process: Build relationships with gatekeepers around those you’re writing speeches for, he says. They’ll give you very useful material and insight.

In a single day we saw an impossibly high example of environmental-purpose PR and potentially some horrendous greenwashing.

In mid-August, Congress approved President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which includes $369 billion in investments for climate change and related issues. IRA’s arguably the largest climate bill in the country’s history. As a result, PR pros are wondering what IRA means, both for companies that have undertaken environmental activities and those getting started.

Former Amazon communicator Peter Kadushin, now a VP at Trident DMG, talks about his two-part communication philosophy.

In this edition of Crisis Averted, we’ve picked examples where we admit a PR crisis hasn’t occurred. Instead, they’re instances where something happened and the aftermath seems ripe for crisis. So, this month’s feature requires a question mark and could read: Have We Averted a Crisis?

We’ve reported on companies that claim they can measure trust. Still, they all have one thing in common: the particular metrics that constitute each company’s version of trust remain a tightly guarded secret.

Do PR crisis pros think or act differently when entering a situation that they know contains, for want of a better term, bad facts? We ask Abigail Greenheck, group SVP, Beehive Strategic Communications, and Daniel Rene, managing director, kglobal.

Each month, we look at new terms picking up steam in the crisis landscape with a definition. This month, we look at ASDA and Blenderbot.ai.