Latest Posts

So you’re writing keyword-rich copy in the inverted pyramid style, including backlinks and making sure all your pages have unique and clear titles? That’s great, but it’s only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to maximizing SEO potential. At the 2017 Social Shake-Up, Carolyn Shelby, SEO director at tronc, Inc., took the audience to school on all of the above, plus more key areas where communications pros have a blind spot.

Stockholders might literally own a brand, but employees—from the C-suite to the customer-service level—are the brand. This sense of unity and shared responsibility needs to be communicated up and down the line, over and over again. At the very least, basic kindness will take root in an organization—not a bad trait to have while the world hungers for the next trending story.

PR News recently asked its community to tell us who should be listed among the top game-changers of PR in the last few years. Here, we look at game-changer Serge Dumont, often called “the father of public relations in China.” Dumont established China’s first joint-venture PR consultancy, Beijing-based Interasia, in 1985, at just 25 years old, and has improved the global reach of Fortune 500 brands such as Nike, Rolls Royce and KFC ever since.

July is the six-month mark of the year, so it’s natural for forecasters to talk about trends to watch in the final half of the calendar. Our not-so-fearless prognosticator and blogger spent some of his July 4th thinking about what’s to come in PR and communications during the rest of 2017. Among the topics covered are AVEs, social media, storytelling, video, brand reputation, cyber and healthcare PR.

We asked thousands of communicators via PR News’ social platforms what they would do if they had an extra $250,000 in their budget. The answers were telling: while “more staff and training” was the #1 answer again, a few other ideas took on some weight, influencer relations and video being two of them.

If you followed this year’s sold-out Social Shake-Up Show online, you know the FOMO-inspiring tweets and posts were flying fast and furious. Here are a curated set of six tweets from the event—from attendee Kelly Stone, social media manager from CompTIA—showcasing some of her key takeaways, including the need to produce influencer guidelines, the value of vulnerability and why you should always put your followers first.

Sometimes you hear about a change being made in the name of optics and think “wow, how has that escaped an update for so long?” Such is the case with a section of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” ride at Disneyland Resort known as the “Wench Auction,” which features animatronic women characters tied together to be auctioned off for marriage to lusty buccaneers.

Influencer marketing can significantly extend a campaign’s reach, but only if it comes off as genuine—if it’s done right, it doesn’t seem like marketing at all. The trick is to ensure that the brand and product align with the influencer’s passion, says Anna Ritchie, social digital manager of integrated marketing at Pepperidge Farm. Ritchie, who will speak to the issue at PR News’ Digital and Marketing Show Oct. 17-19, in Miami, offered a couple of lessons learned in working with influencers.

Gone are the days when merely producing a Facebook Live broadcast was enough to give your brand an automatic algorithm boost. The promotion leading up to and following a Facebook Live broadcast is as crucial as the quality of the stream itself for winning and retaining viewers, according to Tracey Edouard, social media producer at Mashable and host of Mashable’s #BizChats Facebook Live series.

Paid social just got a little easier on our favorite ephemeral social network. Snapchat announced that users can now design Custom Geofilters within the app via an easy-to-use interface. Just open the Settings menu, tap On-Demand Geofilters and you’ll be able to select from a list of occasions, such as Graduation, Wedding and Birthdays. Then you can choose from a number of templates and edit them with the same text, Bitmoji and sticker tools that you use on snaps.