Latest Posts

Many people are talking about Apple’s HomePod, the monolithic and intelligent home speaker the brand unveiled at its Worldwide Developers Conference June 5. With an enviable acoustic and its ability to answer questions about music (“Who’s the guitar player on this track?”), HomePod ($349) can be a nice addition to the home. What about its significance for PR & communications? Maybe that comes down the road. For something from Apple that might have a more immediate meaning for communicators, you need to look at another announcement it made.

If you could give yourself one piece of advice when you started your career, what would it be? As recent PR and communications graduates embark on their first jobs out of school, we asked the PR News community to offer some advice for our profession’s rookies. Here’s a sampling of what PR pros on Twitter had to offer their soon-to-be colleagues.

What can “The Walking Dead” teach us about digital PR? Here, Carmen Collins, a social media manager with Cisco, takes us through four lessons that the zombie hit sensation can teach us about the dizzying highs and terrifying lows of social media, including the importance of building your digital tribe, the need to stay humble and take nothing for granted, and the need to find and use just the right tools.

Our weekly roundup of trends, stories and personnel moves in PR & communications. This week we look at stories about Mr. Met, Walkers Crisps, United Airlines and British Airways. Personnel items include a huge move for Starbucks chief communicator Corey duBrowa and an award for Johna Burke.

Even the most seasoned actors will tell you that performing live is a scary thing. And many brands just starting to experiment with Facebook Live are confronting that same fear. But best practices are emerging through the trial and error of early adopters like IBM. And here, Brittany Detamore, the firm’s social engagement strategist responsible for day-to-day management of the firm’s Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts, offers a few lessons learned for those new to live streaming.

Each year Mary Meeker, a partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, puts together an exhaustive analysis of the latest online trends and the insights that can be gleaned from them. This year the report is a robust 355 pages—but here are a few of the important highlights for PR and marketing professionals.

For some, the traditional press release is in intensive care, fighting for its life in a world of spammed inboxes and 140-character tweets. Others argue the garden-variety press release works just fine, thank you. Perhaps a compromise position is that the traditional press release must adapt to compete in today’s digital environment. Here are tips from PR pros to help you create releases that will entice writers and editors.

Spokespeople may be making poor choices this week, but PR and communications teams are demonstrating that their crisis plans are robust by taking quick, decisive action and communicating it to the public effectively. With influencer marketing on the rise, more PR departments large and small should keep these incidents in mind as potential crisis models to anticipate—and responses to emulate.

In an essay that’s far different than your deep dive at the office, a scuba enthusiast, who’s also a PR exec , relates lessons learned 130-feet underwater that you can apply in your PR career, presumably on terra firma. In addition to planning, teamwork, communications, trust and remaining calm during a crisis, divers and PR practitioners share, or should, a reverence for data. Without constantly keeping an eye on data, divers and communicators can end up all wet.

Generating new and exciting content is essential to any social media strategy, but it’s no small feat. Brands spend a good chunk of their marketing budget on copywriters, agencies and influencers to build a library of rich, dynamic content that captures and captivates their audience’s attention. But there’s another way. Here, Vanessa Sain-Dieguez, senior director of HR digital strategy at Hilton Worldwide, shows how the hotel giant built a tribe of passionate content creators in-house.