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If you are following the crisis communications playbook, you know that taking swift, deliberate and public action to right a wrong is enough to not only mitigate a brand’s crisis—it can even flip the narrative and earn that brand new followers. So after singer/songwriter SZA was racially profiled in a store and blasted the brand on social media, Sephora’s declaration that it would shut down operations for an inclusiveness and diversity training today seemed a smart crisis response. So why is the brand declaring its training has nothing to do with the incident?

Digital teams and SEO experts are no longer comprised strictly of data nerds and left-brainers, but include writers and journalists, sociologists, and anyone with a vested interest in better understanding how people search the web. With this trend, it’s also high time to remember that your content is best optimized for search when everyone in your organization embraces SEO from the start—including PR pros.

Your company has had a data breach. No, it’s potentially had a breach. What’s your counsel to the C-suite? Should the brand reveal this information to the public or wait until you have perfect knowledge? These questions are at the crux of the communicator’s dilemma in the age of cybercrime.

Communicators can perform what looks like magic when they win approval from the C-suite. But what looks like magic starts with reading and understanding data, and presenting it in a comprehensive way. Check out the strategic takeaways from our webinar: How to Prove Social Media ROI to the C-Suite

Crisis is going to strike your clients. This is just reality. So not preparing in advance for a crisis means exposing your clients to potential disaster. In an age when bad news and missteps become public and go viral at the speed of social media, it is absolutely essential to have a concrete crisis prevention and response plan in place. Here are four tried-and-true steps to keep your clients’ reputations safe.

To kick off Pride Month, Budweiser UK announced its partnership with London Pride by launching a “Fly The Flag” campaign featuring nine different brightly-colored Budweiser pint glasses, each depicting a different pride flag. Suffice to say, Twitter wasn’t having it. Advocates in the queer community resented seeing their flags used to sell beer, calling it opportunistic and insincere. Others lamented that Budweiser went too far by over-explaining what the various flags meant.

Eight brilliants students became co-champions of the National Spelling Bee in historic fashion on May 30, 2019. While many communicators will never have to spell the likes of these grammatical behemoths, mistakes can occur even with simple words. Spelling remains one of the top priorities of communications professionals, because spell check cannot always save a true blunder. Typos and misinterpretations still happen.

When it comes to SEO, for better or worse, you’re playing for Google’s team . The thing is, Google changed the landscape a few years ago. So what are the new rules of SEO? We’ll be delving into this our Google Boot Camp for Communicators, going down July 17th at The Yale Club in NYC. Until then, here are three basic rules for solid SEO that can help communicators gain a much-needed base of tech literacy.

Pride Month in June is not only a celebration of how much better things have gotten in a country that once treated LGBTQ people as social pariahs. It’s also a reminder that we still have a long way to go to true equality. Two PR pros discuss the past, present and future of LGBTQ issues and how they relate to PR. This also will be the subject of a June 6 panel at the Museum of Public Relations in NY.

The word “relationships” is baked into the term “media relations,” and we often nurture and grow those relationships around privileged dialogues and access. But in an age when journalistic credibility is often under the microscope, PR pros should be conscious of how the access we provide can stain reporting, learn the editorial guidelines of the publications we work with and make sure our sources will put their names on the record unless their safety is at risk.