Corporate Responsibility

Brands, in an effort to get out a shareable tweet or a super-likeable post, are often caught in a daily trap of shallow engagement with its communities. Your stakeholders — humans just like you and me — want to be part of a movement, not part of a marketing moment. That statement rang true to… Continued

Your first inclination when hearing the story about Mylan and its EpiPen is to categorize it. Put it in a place alongside similar tales. That’s normal. It’s what the human brain does to make sense of incoming stimuli. The EpiPen saga seems like an easy one to handle. We who follow news of brands, particularly in… Continued

You’re halfway through what’s been a rather interesting year in business, politics, brand successes and blunders and Game of Thrones developments. Which is to say: you still have another five solid months to make this your best year ever as a communicator. First, you’ll need to take stock of what you and your team have… Continued

Please visit your local mom-and-pop shops this holiday season. Go to that toy store that's been around for 65 years and which just suffered another humiliating rent increase. Buy your wrapping paper at the greeting card store that's hanging on by its fingernails and getting by on deeply felt smiles. OK, my commercial's over. I'm… Continued

Envision a nationally televised debate among leaders in Public Relations. Who you picture on that stage is a pretty good indicator of the state of our profession. To keep the personalities out of this for now, what issues would you want debated? What are the themes resonating now that also will prepare us for a… Continued

Take a look at your “Meet the Team” and “About Us” pages on your web site. Do these pages reflect a multifaceted workforce? Do the photos of your team and their bios underscore an understanding of your many stakeholders? In other words, can visitors relate to you? You might not think these questions are worth… Continued

Which workplace exchanges do you find to be most difficult? For most people, they’re centered on two things: Personnel and performance. Both of these things straddle the worlds of internal communications and HR, and both are also general managerial challenges. I recently read an interesting column in Business Insider about the toughest conversations you can… Continued

I am writing this blog post because I know you either watch Game of Thrones or have to listen to people who watch it. Not that I’m trying to game the system, but let’s face it: you need a break from your cerebral workday to think or water-cooler-talk about your favorite TV show, be it… Continued

Dispensing advice is a centuries-old activity and it never gets old. When the PR News team decided to produce a Best PR Advice Book, it looked to the smartest people in the room to write it: the speakers and attendees of our PR News conferences. Over the past two years, we’ve disseminated the little black… Continued

Yesterday, I was driving home with a friend, and the conversation turned, as it inevitably does, to Howard Dean’s famous scream in the 2004 presidential campaign. (Okay, it’s not really inevitable, it’s just funny to say that, and it goes to a point I’m about to make.) And that point, to borrow from an old… Continued