Latest Posts

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.

While it’s still difficult to distinguish all the facts in the airline industry’s latest crisis, there’s enough material available so that we can extract several lessons. Speaking of lessons, those who make a living teaching PR have to be thankful for the wealth of material the airlines have provided them in just the past six months. Since the only freebies airlines provide regularly are small bags of peanuts and soft drinks, PR teachers might consider making a charitable donation to the carriers.

Before you hit send, go back and visualize the recipient for a couple of seconds. Are they at the desk when it comes in? Will they read it from their phone while on the road? In other words, have you written something that will cause them to open it and/or something that stands out from the 90 other emails waiting on them?

If I had to pick one thought to summarize this week’s sold-out Social Shake-Up Show, it would be this: The lines between content and marketing are blurring so rapidly, the phrase “content marketing” is starting to become redundant. Words such as authenticity, experiential, immersive and storytelling were heard often during panel sessions and networking breaks to describe this zeitgeist, this evolution of messaging. But to me, it really all comes down to a single, often misunderstood word—empathy.

It is little surprise that millennial members are a sought-after target audience as they compose the nation’s largest living generation. The group is so large that it is almost impossible to make sweeping generalizations about its members. With communicators’ and marketers’ abilities to define and reach segments, it makes little sense to target millennials with a one-size-fits-all approach.

File under “signs of the times”: Republican candidate for the House of Representatives Greg Gianforte violently assaulted a reporter Wednesday, according to the eyewitness account of a a team from the Fox News Channel. The victim, Ben Jacobs of The Guardian, entered a room at Gianforte’s Bozeman, Montana headquarters where the Fox News team was preparing for an interview with the candidate and began questioning Gianforte about the controversial American Health Care Act.

Want to know some of what was on the minds of attendees at the sold-out Social Shake-Up Show? Ask the attendees to discuss 10 social media-related topics toward the end of the conference. That’s just what happened on Wednesday afternoon at the show. Find out what the attendees were thinking about as well as some of their key takeaways.

The Saturday Night Live actor who plays the girl you wish you hadn’t started a conversation with at a party turned out to be quite conversant about social media during Tuesday afternoon’s session of the sold-out Social Shake-Up in Atlanta. Actor/comedian/activist Cecily Strong provided trenchant points about social media as it relates to celebrities and brands. There were plenty of laughs, too. Photo: www.Jkleinphotography.com