Stories by Seth Arenstein

A look at the week that was in PR. This edition includes several Wells Fargo miscues and a poor showing from NBC Today host Matt Lauer during a presidential debate.

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 the pharmaceutical space, have seen it before.

To get readers in the right frame of mind for the start of the school term this two-part series begins by asking a bevy of veteran in-house and agency communicators to discuss the latest trends in the field and how they are being taught (or not) at colleges and graduate schools. Their responses are included in this week’s edition. In our next edition, we’ll present the academics’ responses to similar questions.

A weekly look at the latest trends in PR and communications with a key leader in the industry. This week we speak with Karen Moore, an advocacy PR specialist, who points to data-driven communications and social media as trends in advocacy PR.

A roundup of the week’s new items in PR, including allegations against the Kardashians for endorsing products on social without mentioning that they are paid to do so; the departure of Robyn Massey as Ogilvy’s CCO; more bad news for Chipotle, this time from the NLRB regarding its social media policy.

Shareablee provides data exclusively to PR News Pro about the brands (B2B and B2C) who were most engaged during August 5-17, the first 12 days of the Olympics.

We asked communicators who spoke during PR News’ Big 4 Social Media Summit, Aug. 9-10, San Francisco, to provide insights about how brand communicators can develop a strategy for Facebook content that will enable it to appear in your audience’s news feeds. Ever budget-conscious, we also asked about making videos for Facebook Live without breaking the bank.

This story has two parts and both are germane to communicators. Facebook said it’s working against ad-blocking software, making it more difficult for users to block ads. Basically Facebook says it will be making it more difficult for ad-blocking software to decide what is an ad and what is not. The social media giant also has updated its ad preferences features, allowing people to tell Facebook not to send them ads from particular companies.

It’s happened again. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has upended a major brand for failing to comply with regulations concerning influencers. This time it’s Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Inc. Its online influencers failed “to disclose adequately” that the brand paid them to provide favorable coverage during a late-2014 marketing campaign for video game Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor. The brand settled with the FTC, the agency said July 11.

It’s rare when significant parts of business, government or sports change dramatically. Incremental change is far more common. Yet we find both incremental and significant change in a new Nasdaq Corporate Solutions/ PR News survey of nearly 400 communicators regarding press release distribution and SEO. Nearly 75% of those surveyed last month said the most important objective of sending a press release is to “generate media interest and/or press coverage.” That’s a traditional reasoning. Yet a full 25% said their top priority in sending out a release is “to be seen in web search results” [see infographic and chart on page 4]. That finding about SEO seemed inconsistent with another result: nearly 40% said they fail to consider SEO when it comes to allocating time and resources for press releases. In other words, while PR pros want their press releases to be found in web searches, nearly half are ignoring SEO when they prepare their releases.