Premium Content

Often organizations try too hard to either capitalize on hot news topics or avoid them altogether. Neither strategy is particularly effective. Our resident crisis and measurement guru Katie Paine takes a look at Burger King’s whopping disasters overseas and how the EPA’s attempts at staying out of the headlines have backfired royally.

In our regular feature that looks at presentations, we present slides that offer suggestions on how to pitch media using social media. The thing is, don’t use social media to pitch. On the other hand, it can be very useful to research your targeted reporters and build relationships with them.

In each edition of PR News we highlight takeaways from an article or articles as well as additions to the PR News Resource Center, which is available only to subscribers at https://www.prnewsonline.com/subscriber-resources/

Right or wrong, many executives think the only media that matters is the Wall St. Journal and the NY Times. OK, so how do PR pros get their brands a mention in one of those papers? We turn to someone who’s climbed that mountain. Frederik Bjørndal, who heads media for N. America and Europe for Novozymes, a bio-solutions firm, provides a checklist for getting your pitches read and covered.

Katie Paine looks at how two crises were handled. Sanofi’s Twitter retort to Roseanne Barr’s shot at Ambien for allowing her to create insensitive tweets and Purdue Pharma’s missteps at the outset of the situation and its close-lipped handling of the OxyContin-addiction mess. In the end, every compelling narrative needs a villain, Paine writes

It’s far from a secret that Instagram is a visual channel. Still, some communicators use color palettes, grid layouts and themes to boost engagement on their Instagram feeds. For apartments.com AVP of social media Erica Campbell Byrum, color choice and layout are critical to crafting an Instagram personality that consumers will recognize and engage with at high rates.

Leave it to Cisco’s charismatic Carmen Collins to serve Southern-style sweet tea while explaining the sales funnel. Well, she doesn’t exactly serve sweet tea, but she describes how tea and the sales funnel have plenty in common. She also provides insight on using data to report your social media story to the C-suite. Drink up.

Is there an industry that’s changed more lately or received more attacks than media? With this background PR News surveyed more than 400 communicators about their views of media relations in this uncertain environment and beyond. In short, communicators believe media relations will continue to be an important part of PR, but to be successful they’ll need to adapt to how it has changed. It is unclear they’re prepared to do so.

A trend in PR and marketing is the growing overlap between the two. In some companies the same person heads PR and marketing, although such an arrangement does not guarantee staff in those departments work closely together. With this background we asked 11 brand communicators and senior agency executives how they differentiate their marketing and PR efforts.

Each month we’ll be asking communicators to unload their toolkits and tell us what falls out. In other words, What do you use to do your job? There’s no better duo to begin this feature than Manu Muraro, founder of Your Social Team, and Danielle Brigida, national social media manager, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. We asked them what tools they use to bolster their Instagram feeds.