PR Insiders

May is Mental Health Awareness Month. Since “PR executive” is on the 2019 list of top 10 most stressful jobs, it’s important for communicators, and those who manage and employ them, to consider ways to overcome stress and other mental health issues. Creating an open culture is one tactic that may help mental health and improve communications results.

PRNEWS staffer Sophie Maerowitz spends her off-hours volunteering for New York City cyclist, pedestrian and public transit advocacy organization Transportation Alternatives. At the start, she figured it would be the usual rabble-rousing stuff: showing up to protests, tweeting photos while holding up signs, et al. She now realizes it’s that and much more. She offers tips from her experience at TransAlt that communicators can adapt to urge brand advocates to become involved in social issues.

My off-hours are spent volunteering as an activist for New York City cyclist, pedestrian and public transit advocacy organization Transportation Alternatives (TransAlt). At the start, I figured it’d be the usual rabble-rousing stuff: showing up to… Continued

There’s no rule in media relations that says communicators need to answer a reporter’s question immediately, particularly during a crisis. Never lie to a reporter, but sometimes doing the best thing for a brand means deferring on a question until you’re ready with an answer that’s carefully crafted. Veteran communicator Arthur Solomon offers tips about how to do this well.

Instagram has long since graduated from being a platform for photographers and artists to share and display their work. Now a bona fide marketing, sales and recruiting tool for a range of brands, Instagram’s growth has eclipsed 1 billion active users. 5WPR chief Ronn Torossian offers five basic best practices that brands should bear in mind as they launch or seek to grow their Instagram presence.

How do you get ahead in PR? Doing good work is a must. In fact, doing extra work is one of the secrets. Here are five suggestions about what you can do to bolster your PR career, provided you want to do some additional lifting.

Communicators know it can be difficult to manage a crisis. What about if you’re asked to handle a crisis when the power is down, or you can’t access the Internet or your phone? Better have a digital go-bag ready. Though Adam Probolsky has made preparations for a zombie apocalypse, he also has suggestions for what communicators should pack in their digital go-bags to handle more mundane crises.

Marvel is far more than a brand of comics and films. It’s also a marketing juggernaut. Thing is, Marvel understands the “less is more” approach with its audience. Since it has identified distinct and overlapping segments for each film release, Marvel leaves breadcrumbs of suggestion, which are enough for hardcore fans to pick up the slack. This creates FOMO by withholding information and letting the earned media hype train build momentum with what is ostensibly service journalism.

There are more anxiety-producing things than attending a networking event. Sometimes, though, it seems that list is short. On the other hand, networking works, according to five senior PR pros who shared their wisdom during a recent event in Dallas. Similar to most endeavors, it’s best to have a plan before you begin networking, the communicators said, and being yourself and following-up are musts.

There’s much PR pros can learn about communicating the intricacies of AI from a story this week. It seems Amazon’s Alexa indeed is listening to our conversations. In fact, the hockey-puck-looking device has an army of 1,000 humans who listen to what it picks up in homes around the world. One lesson is that communicators need to urge brands to be transparent in their AI activities.