Stories by Seth Arenstein

In our examination of the Restaurant sector, with Shareablee data provided to us exclusively, we find fewer pieces of content posted in 2017 resulting in a reduction in consumer engagement with the industry. This is a trend buster in that nearly all the industries we’ve seen have reduced content and gained consumer engagement.

There is a slew of caveats in a new study about fake news and its influence on the 2016 U.S. presidential election from three academics at Ohio State University. While it is incorrect to deduce fake news won the election for President Trump, the paper argues fake news influenced many members of one important group and they made a difference in a close election. Imagine what fake claims about your product or a competitor’s product could do to your business.

Several early media reports about yesterday’s awful shooting at YouTube headquarters in San Bruno, CA, linked the alleged shooter’s actions to YouTube policies on monetization of videos and prohibiting gun-related content. In reality the shooter likely was mentally disturbed as there can be no justification for shooting at innocent people. What can brand communicators learn from this incident?

Our weekly roundup of news, trends and personnel moves in the world of communications and marketing. This week’s stories feature Weber Shandwick’s price for its work in the Michigan State U.-Larry Nassar situation, two PR pros tell us how to approach the data-savvy newsroom and Showtime Networks get a new SVP for entertainment publicity.

A perusal of the just-released Monmouth University poll illustrates one of the reasons why trust and reputation are declining among brands, governments, organizations and their leaders. Fake news often is seen as a major catalyst for this ebb of reputation. Unfortunately it appears fake news–defined correctly or not–continues to grow in the mind of the public.

How do you grow an audience? In social media you post content to raise brand awareness. Kylie Cosmetics, Kylie Jenner’s company, writes its own rules. It increased the amount of content on its site by 1 percent from 2016 to 2017. It grew its audience 129%.

We know that we should eat healthier and exercise more, but the vast majority of us do not. New surveys show people lack trust in Facebook’s handling of their personal information. Does this mean they’ll no longer use it as much? And what does a reduction in trust mean for a brand? We tackle these and other questions.

The Selfie Generation is a difficult moniker for Millennials to be proud of. A new study from Fuse Media could help. It argues that Millennials are far more interested in values, diversity and societal issues than they appear to be. And while they are more comfortable with social media than older generations, their dependance on communications technology is highly overrated.

We’ve seen it before but it never seems to lose its irony: A brand built on something turns out to be in short supply of it. The British arm of KFC recently ran out of chicken. Built on collecting and protecting sensitive financial data, Equifax turned out to be clueless when handling customers’ confidential information. And Facebook, which espouses “meaningful social interactions,” has leaders who have been slow to talk about its biggest crisis yet.

Our weekly roundup of news, trends and personnel moves in communications and marketing. This week’s stories include Google’s transparency on fake content is something Facebook should consider, a slap from Google at Amazon, Wells Fargo offers its CEO a large increase, Theranos’ Holmes gets off easy and Chipotle’s chief marketer is out.