Stories by Sophie Maerowitz

For Kieran Fagan, vice president of communications at Aetna, successfully communicating and using key performance indicators across a business relies on a unique combination of training, transparency and planning. Fagan, who will be speaking at PR News’ Measurement Conference April 16-18 in Philadelphia, shares three steps to leveraging KPIs internally.

In the fast-paced world of social media, careers can be made or broken in the blink of an eye—sometimes even the click of a button. The latter is the case with former Marriott social media employee Roy Jones, who has been fired for liking a Jan. 9 tweet by a group called Friends of Tibet, which drew the ire of the Chinese government and its supporters on social media.

Six years ago, Carly Keeny had a hard time convincing her colleagues at United Way of Greater Philadelphia and Southern New Jersey that social media was anything more than a place to store content. Since then, however, Keeny has led the organization to viewing social media as a powerful and cost-efficient way to promote its mission. Keeny’s team focuses primarily on three social media KPIs: applause (likes), amplification (retweets/shares) and conversation (questions and comments).

Does your organization measure results before, or after, a campaign has run its course? For Whitney Drake, who leads General Motors’ Story Bureau and Analytics function, measuring campaigns from the start is the key to more meaningful metrics—not to mention a more insights-driven workplace culture.

With more than 48,000 tweets and counting, the #BoycottNRA hashtag is trending and brands are listening. In response to the outcry following the Feb. 14 Parkland, Fla. school shooting, several national brands have rescinded their NRA membership discounts in support of gun control, including Best Western, Wyndham Hotels, Alamo Rent A Car, Enterprise Rent-A-Car and First National Bank of Omaha, among others.

Hunger prevention, hurricane relief, academic scholarships: These are just a few of the worthy causes spotlighted by the 2018 PR News’ Nonprofit Awards finalists. The awards—which benchmark and celebrate the past year’s top nonprofit communications campaigns and the storytellers behind them—will be announced, along with the winners of PR News’ CSR Awards, at a luncheon March 20, 2018 at The National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

Each year, PR News honors the top corporate social responsibility campaigns—and the brands and communicators behind them—at its CSR & Nonprofit Awards Luncheon at Washington, D.C.’s historic National Press Club. From environmental protection to disaster relief to gender equality, these campaigns and communicators have enacted positive change that will be felt for years to come.

Facebook woke up this morning to see another gray hair in the mirror. While Facebook’s popularity with younger users has been on the decline for some time, a new report from market-research firm eMarketer quantifies just how bad this year’s exodus will be. Facebook is set to shed about 2 million users under the age of 24 this year.

If the fragmented media environment is a sick patient, machine learning may be the cure. That was the proposition Andrew Heyward, visiting scholar from MIT’s Media Laboratory and former president of CBS News, outlined in his presentation, “Can Robots Solve Your PR Problems?” at the New York offices of agency Makovsky on Feb. 6.

To many of us the Super Bowl is about advertising, not football. Twitter launched a competition for Super Bowl LII with just those people in mind. Its inaugural #BrandBowl pitted Super Bowl advertisers against each other in various categories looking at the highest engagement across a given industry while the game aired. One category, #Interception, looked solely at brands without a Super Bowl ad that drove high engagement. The #Interception award winner, Ally Bank, had to cut through the online noise generated by some of the nation’s largest brands.