Topics

Few companies are trying to make a Starbucks-like statement in today’s highly politicized communication environment. Many brands want to respect the diverse opinions of their employees and customers and avoid becoming a target of unanticipated backlash. Here are a few ways communicators can help brands navigate today’s highly charged environment. Fortunately, most of them are basic tenets of PR and communications. Brushing up on the basics can be especially useful in today’s climate.

Something we’ve observed at PR News in recent years: We don’t see “PR” in job titles quite as often as we used to. One reason may be that so few communicators today are restricted to traditional PR functions like media relations and crisis management. In 2017 they are tasked with so much more, from content creation and social media management to email marketing and brand development.

Before she measures the success of any campaign, January Williams begins with the question, “What am I asking the audience to do?” Williams, the director of online communications and outreach for the nonprofit Children’s Defense Fund (CDF), doesn’t try to be all things on all platforms. While some initiatives, like increasing the CDF’s number of followers, are easy to measure, most of what the organization does—when issuing legislative calls to action or fundraising, for example—is all about engagement. Here are three ways she uses analytics to drive action.

There were many examples last month of organizations screwing up and resulting in crises badly handled. We could have piled on PwC for the Oscars, but given that Hollywood obsessed about it for weeks, it was hard to find much more to say. And of course, we would have loved to weigh in on the great leggings-on-United kerfuffle clinging to Twitter as, well, leggings do. But frankly, in these times, all that seemed trivial compared to a couple of serious crises plaguing America’s military.

When a massive, five-alarm fire broke out on a Saturday evening in busy Gilbert, Arizona, a Phoenix suburb home to nearly 250,000 residents, the Gilbert Fire and Rescue Department partnered with Gilbert’s Digital Communications Department to take a teamwork and technology approach to communication and community outreach. Here’s how they did it.

Most of us are familiar with the core KPIs of Google Analytics such as users, sessions, page views, bounce rate, average time on page, search and CTR. These metrics are important to The Coca-Cola Company too. But do they provide the holistic view the company needs? The answer is, no, because they alone do not capture engagement. So, the company created its own KPI.

Journalists and influencers believe that factual content ranks higher with online audiences than emotional content, according to a recent Cision report. Yet at a panel discussion in New York this week, communicators said that emotionally driven content has undeniable power to attract audiences and can even build trust in a brand.

Timely content is king. The good news in today’s digital world is that companies are now in the content driver’s seat. But with so many channels and platforms at their disposal, many brands struggle to be relevant on all of them, all the time. That is leading some to make poor decisions about content type, timing and topic. Here are two examples of how Southwest Airlines strikes while the iron is hot.

The social media giant has launched Stories, a Snapchat clone that gives Facebook users access to the two most unique aspects of the Snapchat interface: content that disappears after 24 hours and augmented reality lenses. This is the first Snapchat-pioneered feature to make its way into the central panel of Facebook’s marquee app.

Social media exposes many ironies, including the possibility that we are less social because of social media. Remember the days when we used our phone for talking, not typing? And when a friend was someone… Continued