Latest Posts

The massive growth in businesses shifting functions, products and processes online means cyber risk is growing too. Hopefully you and your clients already have top-notch crisis plans in place—but do you have a specific plan to address a cyber attack? If not, the time to tackle that is now. Don’t wait to strategize until you face a hacking or breach scenario that could potentially destroy you or your client’s brand.

Because reputation lies at the heart of public relations, organizations have come to determine their own definitions of brand safety as digital marketing evolves. Brand safety is no longer solely about ad placements, but has grown to include associations with malevolent sentiment, influencers’ stodgy backgrounds and unfortunate algorithmic decisions.

There is a proverb that says, “Failure is the mother of success.” And we, as business professionals, know this to be true. So why do we only discuss our triumphs? In this PRNEWS series, in partnership with the Institute for Public Relations, some of the most successful leaders in the industry will share the lessons they have learned from failure.

Amazon’s Accelerator program, launched in spring 2018, provides select manufacturers with prioritized exposure in exchange for commitment to marketing on the platform. Amazon offers placement at the top of search results in addition to feedback and shipping logistics assistance, on the condition that businesses meet sales quotas and dedicate branding to the conglomerate platform. The deal may sound like a no-brainer for struggling enterprises and start-ups in need of publicity, but coming under the protection of the tech giant’s umbrella could mean signing away native audiences and the potential for independent PR.

Strong relationships are founded, in part, on good communication. If that’s so, then why aren’t more relationships between brands and their PR agencies described in glowing terms? After all, professional communicators should be adept at communicating with each other, right? In the case of brand-PR agency relationships, there’s a bit more to it than communications. Here are five tips that will enhance this sometimes volatile partnership.

Digital platforms are constantly rolling out new products and services to improve the user experience, but seldom do those new features consider the user’s experience off the platform. That’s where Pinterest, a social platform that organizes images on a digital corkboard, has broken new ground. Yesterday, its product team announced “an entirely new experience centered around emotional wellbeing,” reports Wired. “When you type in an anxiety-related query—something like ‘work anxiety,’ or ‘dealing with stress’—Pinterest will now display a box above the stream of pins.”

Yesterday, Bloomberg cited a 2018 Pew Research Center study that found YouTube to be the most popular online platform among those in rural America—at 59 percent—drawing more eyes than Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and more. This trend comes bundled with some strong takeaways for communicators about why how-to, service-oriented content always does well and why YouTube is a more powerful platform for engagement than many PR Pros realize.

In this regular feature, PR News asks movers and shakers in the industry to share a little bit of their personal history and personality through answering a series of 12 questions.

More, more, more seems the catchphrase of the digital way of life. Perhaps, though, we’ve reached an inflection point. Several social media and digital thinkers lately have started to espouse the need for a less-is-more viewpoint. The latest is John Shehata, a Condé Nast VP, who argues that instead of creating more and more content that few will read, a path to success is to use SEO analysis to pick evergreen content that can be strategically refreshed and re-published.

For the better part of the century, women have been underrepresented in every corner of the market, plastered into the rigid roles of the cleaning moms, loyal wives, and unintelligent accessories to men. This inequality has been expressed through hyper-sexualized ads and subtler degradation in the mainstream media. So, how will PR respond to this change, heated by the fury of millions of women exhausted from being inaccurately characterized and appealed to?