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For those of you considering selling your firm or acquiring one, it’s important to know that valuing PR agencies is an inexact science and a complex process. It takes financial expertise, knowledge of the M&A marketplace and an understanding of how buyers create offers/term sheets. Below are several things you need to consider as you begin the valuation process.

There’s a science to waiting, to delaying a behavior. Think about dating and travel sites where the customer stares at a screen anticipating the “perfect match” or “best price” on a flight. You want the site to take its time, not rush into something important that could change your social life or save you money. If the match popped up on the screen too soon, you’d think it were a generic algorithm and you’d dismiss the recommendation.

Athletes are always on stage and they carry a tremendous amount of responsibility by representing not only themselves but also their sponsors (and their sponsor’s customers), their sport, their teams and their countries, which means they have much to lose when things go awry.

The classic school of crisis management is rooted in the concept of goodwill banks, with the idea being that a company builds up goodwill over time, which is a currency that helps withstand a crisis. While much has changed in the best practices of crisis management, the concept of building a goodwill bank still holds up. Fundamentally, building a goodwill bank begins with building relationships. Just like any relationship, if it’s one sided—where one party is always asking for something—it rarely becomes a trusted relationship.

Is advertising on Pinterest for you? According to Pew Research Center, Pinterest users are mostly white or Hispanic women under 50, often college-educated and earning $30k or more, but spread fairly equally across urban, suburban and rural populations. If this sounds like your demographic, take a good look at getting in on the ground floor of the newest addition to the Great Video Explosion of 2016.

Smart communications professionals prepare well-thought-out objectives and tactics in the planning phase before ever presenting a list of measurable outcomes to the C-suite. But before naming these objectives and tactics, PR professionals need to know exactly who their intended audience is. Building personas—semi-fictional representations of individual archetypes within a brand’s ideal audience—is a crucial step in pinpointing the ideal target group for any PR or communications campaign. Here are the three richest sources for persona building.

While it’s almost time for school to begin in many parts of the country, there’s still a bit of time left in baseball season. And since the topic of today’s post is media pitching, our baseball-addled mind, or what’s left of it, thinks of relating media pitching to baseball pitching. It’s also a chance to, er, throw in a bunch of baseball references.

If it’s your job to create and share content on behalf of a brand, then you know the feeling of shooting in the dark. You’re constantly asking yourself if a content idea will resonate with your audience. In the search for great content that inspires engagement, we so often forget to look in the most obvious place.

If it’s your job to create and share content on behalf of a brand, then you know the feeling of shooting in the dark. You’re constantly asking yourself if an article or blog post idea… Continued

In a new move to establish itself as a player in visual media, Twitter has released promoted stickers for users to slap on photos, with Pepsi as its launch partner. Promoted stickers allow brands to design four to eight images that appear in the group of stickers users can scroll through and select when decorating photos in the app. Twitter’s blog pitches the branded stickers as “an opportunity for brands to drive brand affinity and raise awareness of their message at scale…to create an interactive experience.”