Latest Posts

Each year, PR News’ Digital PR Awards recognize the year’s top digital communicators and campaigns in a variety of media such as video, website design, mobile apps and more. We announced the winners and honored all of the finalists for the Digital PR Awards at our luncheon Nov. 8 at the Yale Club in New York City.

No doubt your grandparents have heard of Twitter from President Trump’s constant use of the platform. And you doubtless know that today is the official date for Twitter to expand its 140-character limit to 280. But what pundits have dubbed a bad move for the social media bird’s brand may end up benefitting PR pros and marketers.

Facebook, Apple, Uber, Nike, Walmart, McDonald’s and more are all members of the unhappy fraternity of brands named in the “Paradise Papers,” a trove of millions of documents leaked to the International Consortium of Independent Journalists (ICIJ) that purport to reveal prominent people and companies using offshore havens to avoid tax.

As we’ve seen in recent weeks, a tumultuous news cycle—compounded by an online community rattled by recent violent events—can be a breeding ground for rumors, hoaxes and false reports. In the last few days alone, the San Antonio shooter was misidentified as a member of both the alt-right and alt-left movements, Twitter swirled with rumors of Snapchat’s demise and Facebook pulled a failed fake-news curtailing experiment.

Disney recently barred a Los Angeles Times film critic from pre-screening its movies in retaliation for unfavorable coverage, and many critics and critics associations are showing solidarity by refusing to review or give awards to Disney movies. The feud calls into question Disney’s media relations strategy—rather than defuse an issue it had with one media outlet, it poured fuel on the fire and in the process, the story it disputes has been amplified.

In this first article of a five-part series produced with partner PublicRelay, a media monitoring and analytics firm, we will examine the common challenges of measuring communications data so it can be turned into useful insights that will help not only communicators but the business overall.

Our weekly roundup of news, trends and personnel moves in PR and communications. This week’s stories include Papa John’s deflection onto the NFL; a judge tells Wells Fargo’s board and senior executives they should have known; and IBM’s Jon Iwata is getting set to retire.

Juli Briskman, who worked in marketing and communications, was fired from Akima LLC for using the photo of her flipping-off President Trump’s motorcade as her profile photo. While we don’t know Akima’s exact social media policy, many companies have taken similar actions—in the eyes of employers, an employee’s personal social media pages reflect on a company.

Scheduling tweets and recycling old content are best practices, but the NRA failed to take into account that it is an extremely crisis-prone brand and scheduled a tweet that looked insensitive in the context of the Texas church shooting. This should be addressed in every brand’s crisis plan.

When Papa John’s blamed its declining sales on the issue of NFL players kneeling during the national anthem, many found the correlation hard to believe. DiGiorno Pizza saw the opportunity to call them out for it on Twitter and did not hold back, while Pizza Hut subtly thrust itself into the spotlight.