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Our friends in marketing have been conducting observational research for years, and now leading communicators are following suit. Think of it as a tactical adaptation bred of a Darwinian necessity—it’s a messaging jungle out there, and if we are to survive we must be ruthlessly in touch with our stakeholders’ realities so we can somehow influence them with our words and images.

People often spend their workdays stuck in the “important and urgent” mindset—things that need to happen and need to happen now. With budgets, deadlines and pressing client requests, it can be difficult to find time for anything else. But spending too much of your workday stuck here limits professional growth and development.

Public Relations professionals are under more and more pressure to measure the results of their work. At the same time, the professional media outlets, which have been the mainstay of the third-party credibility model, continue to crumble while digital communication has taken center stage.

Less than a week after it went public Nov. 7 Twitter rolled out a new tool called custom timelines. The feature enables its users to drag and drop tweets to form custom lists of Twitter messages on whatever topic interests them. For PR pros patched into Twitter there’s probably a lot more where that came from

What do you do when your CEO is under siege, the media smell blood and the story you’re trying to control takes on a life of its own?

My previous two articles set the stage for developing a successful tracking program. We begin by defining objectives and establishing tracking mechanisms to ensure proper data collection.

More than three-quarters of moms (80%) nationwide are making the major household purchasing decisions for their families, per a recent Child’s Play Communications study. Dads may still have a long way to go before they catch up, but the tide is slowly changing.

PR News will announce the winners of the 2013 PR People Awards at a Dec. 10 luncheon at Washington, D.C.’s National Press Club. We’ll also honor this year’s inductees into the PR News Hall of Fame and the 2013 People to Watch list of Rising PR Stars (listed here).

In the social media world, the process of turning an individual into a so-called thought leader begins with “content.” Initially, this involves creating and posting blogs and comments on others’ blogs, but also includes creating and posting other written content, such as white papers, case studies, and eBooks.

On a daily basis, we see Democrats and Republicans trying to shape the narrative and control the story and, therefore, public opinion.