Latest Posts

If you’ve been thinking about starting a blog but worried about the time investment, you’re not alone. In a world where you can fire off a tweet or a snap in second, the prospect of blogging seems daunting from a time management perspective. But there are smart ways to make it work, and Jackie Allder, director, public relations & communications for The Long & Foster Companies, is familiar with many of them.

Burger King has transformed a simple TV ad into a mouthwatering engagement goldmine…almost. The fast-food chain would have gotten away with it too, if it hadn’t been for those pesky kids at Google (and on the internet at large). On April 12, Burger King aired an ad in which an actor asks, “OK Google, what is the Whopper burger?” The line was intended to prompt Google Home devices to read a list of Whopper ingredients from Wikipedia, but anonymous pranksters edited the Whopper Wikipedia article to include some less-than-appetizing ingredients.

Data-driven marketing is not just a buzz term, it’s a real business need. But data analysis requires human intervention and it’s easy to mistakenly select metrics that are not delivering the full picture or are misleading. To understand how marketers are implementing data, we asked five of the industry’s best and brightest: Are you using data for your social media marketing efforts? How does it guide your decisions? Here’s what they said.

Most Fortune 500 brands are working hard to cultivate a network of loyal customers online. Mostly, this community-building happens on social media when brands build pages and platforms to attract and retain those loyal customers. However, many brands develop myopic views around their categorized and quantified loyalty group, which limits the ability to reach a larger group of customers. Here are three tips to keep in mind to make sure that doesn’t happen to you.

“Dying is easy, comedy is hard,” has been attributed to different people, from the actors Jack Lemmon and Gregory Peck to thespians Edmund Kean and Edmund Gwenn. Perhaps we can augment that aphorism: “Dying is easy, communicating is hard.” Examples abound why this is so. United, Pepsi and Wells Fargo are only the latest.

Videos of a man being dragged off of a United flight Sunday night have quickly spread through the web, drawing widespread condemnation and outrage. While United CEO Oscar Munoz publicly apologized the next day and said the company was investigating the incident, he took a decidedly tougher stance in an internal letter to employees. Instead of acknowledging that the company’s “established procedures” might need to be re-examined, Munoz doubled-down, citing policy and effectively passing the buck. Worse yet, the letter went on to shift the blame to the passenger.

In early March, Washington, D.C.’s NFL franchise found itself the subject of scorn. The team fired its general manager a bit more than two years into a four-year contract, despite the club’s improved record on the field after years of futility. In an article covering the firing, the Washington Post quoted a statement from the team’s president wishing the ousted general manager “well in his future endeavors. The team will have no further comment on his departure.” What happened next turned into a PR fiasco.

Al Golin, founder of global PR firm Golin and noted PR luminary, passed away peacefully at the age of 87 on April 8. More than just the mind behind one of PR’s most successful agencies, Al Golin made many contributions to the evolution of public relations, launching groundbreaking socially minded initiatives, mentoring scores of PR professionals and making the greater good a core part of his company’s culture.

Our weekly look at trends, news and personnel moves in PR and communications. This week we look at the Bill O’Reilly sex scandal, the Pepsi race commercial and the Arthur W. Page Society’s reactions to fakenews during its spring summit.

Some things never change. That’s true in PR, too. The reasons are many. It’s easier to go with the flow than incorporate new thinking. Supervisors fail to give young staff opportunities to try new technique. Staff fear criticizing the boss. Those who advocate change are seen as mavericks and tend to be ostracized. The result is that, well, things change way too slowly. Here’s a list of PR sacred cows that need to be challenged.