Topics

Chick-fil-A wisely halted sales of its Chocolate Chunk Cookies when its supplier, CSM Bakery Solutions, informed it that the cookies contained a trace of peanuts in them. That’s in contrast to dietary information it supplies to customers at its restaurants and online that the cookies are peanut-free.

If you’re like most content publishers, you probably measure time spent on a page, a helpful adjustment to your basic bounce rate metric. Guess who else is paying attention to that? Facebook. In a recent blog post, the social media kingpin announced that they will update publishers’ rankings based on how much time users spend looking at an article in the Facebook mobile browser after clicking through from News Feed.

Behind the scenes, certain heroes have been meeting and debating about the standardization of PR measurement practices, and putting these practices to work and doing, yes, PR, for these practices. At PR News’ annual Measurement Conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., we inducted a few of these heroes into PR News’ Measurement Hall of Fame.

It’s impossible for PR pros to stack up against the cultural powerhouse that Beyoncé’s become over the years—when her messages get transmitted, all others get muffled. There are a few things, though, about Beyoncé’s marketing style that PR pros would be remiss to ignore.

PR firms have a massive opportunity to go way beyond the old practice of merely pitching existing news. The smartest among us can become masters of crafting the news. That means spotting trends and keeping up with what’s developing in pop culture, then using those insights to put out routine news in more compelling ways, create opportunities and coattail on relevant breaking news.

If you’re measuring every activity because you think more is more and that everything is important, then it’s time to switch lanes. But as you embark on a week of heavy measuring, I realize you might need a pep talk. So here’s a few morsels of wisdom from our conference speakers to get your engine running.

If that new car you’re shopping for doesn’t have the latest bells and whistles, it’s likely you’ll opt for the one that sports the coolest technology and whose dashboard displays practically everything except your blood… Continued

In potential crisis situations, UNOS invokes a crisis communications plan and involves UNOS executive staff members and elected officers.

As a local and network news reporter, I conducted thousands of interviews over nearly two decades. Yet it was only after I made the leap into strategic and crisis communications that I fully appreciated the complex dynamic at play.

Is the glass half empty or half full? That’s the dilemma raised by the latest PR News survey about measurement practices. On the upside, more PR pros appear to be relying on measurement than previously. The flip side is the pace toward a more analytical mindset is incremental.