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“How many of you have ever felt stuck at some point in your career?” That was how Joanna Coles began her talk at PRSA’s conference earlier today. As someone with an impressive and long-running career at the helm of some of the biggest media properties in the world, Coles has a deep well of wisdom to draw upon for PR pros. Women and men have parts to play in closing the gender gap in PR, she said.

Companies like Nike and Ben & Jerry’s have demonstrated the power of brand activism in marketing. With consumer expectations shifting in a tumultuous political environment, what happens when a brand decides to take a neutral approach? Online home furnishing company Wayfair is right now finding out the hard way.

What are your choices for the top PR crises of 2019’s first six months? As is her custom, Solomon McCown & Company president Ashley McCown goes out on a limb, picking her top five and presenting them in this short video. Can you guess what her quintet of PR crises will be? One hint: her top picks involves a global brand that was a leader in its sector, at least it was prior to its crisis.

Content creators strive for the day a piece of work goes viral. And unfortunately there’s no platform or tool or magic spell that can make this happen. The best public relations pros can do is to research their audience and provide quality work that resonates and appeals with the consumer of the content. However, there are some best practices to follow to boost the performance of your work—so you can increase reach toward the desired groups.

If “purpose” is to last as one of PR’s top buzzwords, brands need to step up their game. Already in the past few weeks we’ve seen Nike forced to adjust its purpose concerning treatment of pregnant spokespeople. Now Google, which espouses free speech, among other lofty values, is warning staff there will be repercussions should they protest as Google employees during this weekend’s Pride festivities in San Francisco. Apparently for Google, free speech has its limits.

Every fall in NYC, PR News celebrates the agencies with exceptional campaigns at our Agency Elite Awards, which benchmark excellence in PR agencies’ key practice areas, from advocacy, crisis communications and social media to internal communications, media relations and reputation management. As we head into judging phase for this year’s awards on November 20th, let’s look back at some of last year’s highlights.

We all face two big challenges: a flood of information at our fingertips, and less and less time to make any sense of it. So if your online newsroom isn’t visually appealing, easy to quickly navigate and useful, it’s likely you won’t reach the audience and media you’re targeting. Here are some quick tips from experts to ensure your brand newsroom isn’t costing you any opportunities.

Putting Facebook’s problems with inconsistent messaging aside, the “platform vs. publisher” debate has considerable relevance for PR pros, whose success in Media Relations largely depends on building out some variation of a PESO strategy that involves a traditional ad spend, an earned media component, solid SEO and robust owned content delivery channels. Communicators are in a position to become influencers of Facebook’s policy, not just through their partnerships with marketing and ad spends, but by treating the ubiquitous social network as a “publication” and not a “platform.” Here’s why.

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.

Brands taking a position on social or political issues has been all the rage. Alan Jope, the new Unilever CEO, might be pushing things to the next level. At Cannes Lions he said Unilever will “dispose” of brands that lack purposeful messaging. Is this strong statement a shot across marketing’s bow?