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In today’s personality-driven culture, it’s sometimes hard to sort out whether it’s the guy at the top who causes a crisis or the culture he has created within the organization. Either way, most of the time, a crisis starts at the top. But in 2017, one could make the case that cultural and social norms are exerting a greater influence than the people in charge. The crises we’ll examine here, PewDiePie/Youtube/Disney/Google and Uber’s latest, we would argue, owe as much if not more to changing norms than to corporate leadership.

You might think branded content sites have little organization behind them. Perhaps that’s so at some sites. The branded content portal at monster.com is the opposite, however. Content and staff are organized into three groups: to raise awareness; to (gently) nudge readers to investigate what the site offers; and to assist those who are highly motivated to find jobs.

PR and communications teams increasingly are pressured to own their brand’s earned media space beyond their borders to keep up with – and stand uniquely apart from – competitors. This is becoming true for non-profits competing for donor dollars and has been a constant for the private sector. In this article you will find steps for building and increasing global earned media visibility for your brand.

Does a day pass during your life as a PR pro when you don’t need to write? For those of us who do a lot of writing – and that’s most of us – we will, at one time or another, face an insurmountable case of writer’s block. One day you’re at the top of your game, pounding out pitches, speeches, tweets and press releases like a high-powered printing press, and the next moment you’re struggling to find anything to write. It happens to all of us, but there are always ways to jump-start your creativity. Here are four tips for getting out of a creative rut.

In an era of severely limited organic reach, a paid social strategy that optimizes your budget is critical. But how can you best use promoted posts to reach your business goals without breaking the bank? That was the central question tackled by James Chong, senior manager of social customer engagement at TOMS, and Lauren de la Fuente, vice president of marketing and communications at Boingo Wireless, at PR News’ Digital Summit Feb. 24.

In our personal and working lives, relationships get frayed; friends, colleagues, competitors and customers get angry at us. We have to decide when to just let things blow over, and when to reach out to the angry party. The same holds true for organizations. The only thing that’s different for organizations, perhaps, is today’s heightened political climate and the speed of news cycles.

“Not every incident needs a response, but incidents that are ignored can lead to a bigger crisis.” This crisis management advice comes directly from Ernest DelBuono, senior strategist for strategic communications firm Levick. At its… Continued

In today’s rapid-fire world of communications, brand reputations can be torn down in a moment by a single tweet or Facebook post. One of the major facets of being prepared for such a crisis is having a staff that’s ready to respond and rebuild at a moment’s notice. To investigate the process behind preparing staff for a calamity, PR News opened its Crisis Management Boot Camp on Feb. 23 with a session on building a flameproof crisis team.

This update is important because it takes over a function of Facebook, long the platform of choice for posting albums of pictures. Another important consequence for brands: Instagram users will get in the habit of swiping left and right to see more content, thereby becoming more comfortable with carousel ads, which have already been available to advertisers but different enough from a normal Instagram post that users might not have been inclined to swipe—until now.

Imagine that a restaurant’s menu offers a delicious-looking entree of spaghetti, meatballs and red sauce. Wonderful. Well, sorry, but you are prohibited from ordering them together, on a single plate. Absurd, right? Sounds like a Seinfeld episode. That is the state of earned, paid and owned media. You can use PR for earned media, digital marketing or advertising for paid media, or content marketing for owned media. But mixing them? Blasphemy.