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Late last month, cyber crime whacked yet another large brand. On the evening of July 29, Capital One , the nation’s largest issuer of credit cards and the 10th largest bank by assets, issued a statement that millions of its accounts were compromised. While brands are concerned about their sites and servers, few seem to take seriously the security of their social media platforms, a new study finds.
Awareness campaigns are important, but after your target audience is aware of your message, it’s time to move ahead. Constantly restating the same awareness message year after year will eventually turn off your audience. Instead, it’s time to leave your comfort zone and move on to the next level of marketing.
Brands and organizations often fail to create as much awareness around anniversaries and other milestones. To remedy this situation requires just a bit of creativity, argues Michael Munz, president of The Dalton Agency.
Since the dawn of PR as a profession, the sector has been fighting for the right to exist. If you’ve been considering how to reframe PR functions as part of a broader business strategy, here are five ways to stay focused.
The new Chief Strategy Officer at FleishmanHillard, Marjorie Benzkofer, talks to us about how she keeps 4,000 employees working in concert and why brands continue to struggle aligning their values and actions.
We assume journalists decide what to cover based on what their readers want to know about, right? Maybe not. A study of travel writers finds their top criteria is their interest in a topic. This means those who pitch to travel journalists must adjust their tactics.
Even with something as relatively new as social media, it’s good to have a brand with years of name recognition. In addition, size can be beneficial. Harvard leads U.S. colleges and universities in consumer engagement with social posts for the first half of 2019, according to data provided to us exclusively by Shareablee.
At the heart of PR is storytelling. The ability to describe the goals and purpose of an organization stems from communicating a clear narrative. Building a brand newsroom allows for a living, breathing example of your priorities. While it’s nice to have a large budget, small expenditures can be used to create a respectable brand newsroom.
With school beginning soon (yes, the summer has flown by), we turn to educators, most of whom are or were PR pros, to tell us what areas of the profession communications students need additional training in. Then we ask PR pros to give us their assessment of incoming PR candidates and their training needs.
Go big or go home does’t necessarily apply to innovation, says Scott Steinberg, author and business consultant. Armed with knowledge about their customers, communicators can advocate for brands to make small, tactical changes to products and services that can yield significant results. Steinberg discussed his ideas about thinking small to go big during PRNEWS’ Measurement Conference in Washington, DC.
Leave it to Cisco’s charismatic Carmen Collins to serve Southern-style sweet tea while explaining the sales funnel. Well, she doesn’t exactly serve sweet tea, but she describes how tea and the sales funnel have plenty in common. She also provides insight on using data to report your social media story to the C-suite. Drink up.
Each month we’ll be asking communicators to unload their toolkits and tell us what falls out. In other words, What do you use to do your job? There’s no better duo to begin this feature than Manu Muraro, founder of Your Social Team, and Danielle Brigida, national social media manager, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. We asked them what tools they use to bolster their Instagram feeds.
It’s far from a secret that Instagram is a visual channel. Still, some communicators use color palettes, grid layouts and themes to boost engagement on their Instagram feeds. For apartments.com AVP of social media Erica Campbell Byrum, color choice and layout are critical to crafting an Instagram personality that consumers will recognize and engage with at high rates.
With Instagram boasting 800 million active monthly users and 80% of them following brands on the platform, we asked communicators for best practices for being successful on the graphic-based platform. They told us carefully picked influencers and attention to creating consistent visuals are critical.
A soccer trade show sounds like a decent idea, but in Canada? Here’s how Rich Padulo took his idea from conception to reality. He shares what he learned along the way.
We enjoy learning about brands using unusual communications methods. Capital One bank is well known for its “What’s in Your Wallet?” tagline and sponsorship of sporting events. One of the country’s leading issuer of credit cards, the bank leaves its cards home for its latest communication effort. Instead, it concentrates on conversations with customers about purposeful travel.
Previously, to raise awareness of its sunny surplus, Arizona deployed mostly traditional paid media: print advertising, television and radio, billboards. Then a PR firm urged it to spread the sunshine via social media. Targeting Chicago and NY residents who were tired of winter, Arizona has mounted a clever campaign whose main goal is to associate the state with happiness.
A case study about CSR illustrates the importance of communicating your CSR work both externally and internally.
How can a brand or organization communicator generate positive media coverage when reporters gravitate toward bad stories? This case study offers an example of how a communications team at a jail overcame that issue. And the resulting story continues to generate additional positive coverage.
The disparity between the number of communicators and reporters is widening. The ratio stands at 6:1, meaning that journalists may feel even more besieged. This puts an emphasis on knowing how to do media pitching in the most successful ways. PRNEWS asked ClarityPR to survey journalists about what turns them on or off about PR pitches. We also asked how many journalists have Twitter shamed communicators. Their response was unfortunate.
The use of influencers is such a new tactic, there’s a lack of agreement on what exactly an influencer is. There’s plenty of agreement, though, about the popularity and importance of influencer marketing and communication, a new survey from PR News and Meltwater shows. The survey also finds brands’ and organizations’ budgets for influencer spending are holding steady or rising.
A new study from PR News and Crisp, a social media issue detection and crisis monitoring firm, of more than 400 PR executives finds more than half of respondents saying their brands and organizations have current crisis plans. The downside is brands seem slow to react to a situation during off hours and communicators say they lack the resources to respond to a crisis.
A trio of new studies tell you the best time and day to pitch your stories to media, why scalability is a concern with influencers and a common concern among PR’s women and men.
Infographics continue to be a great way to deliver information to your clients and those your clients want to reach. A study by Demand Gen report found that infographics can boost web traffic by 12… Continued
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