Stories by Seth Arenstein

Our weekly roundup of news, trends and personnel announcements in the PR and communications field. This week’s stories include one about fakenews, culture changes at Uber and Wells Fargo, new features for Instagram and a promotion for Coca-Cola sustainability officer Bea Perez.

If economics is the dismal science, then measurement surely must make a compelling argument for being PR’s grim discipline. There are plenty of tools for PR measurement, but which one to choose? And then, what should you measure? Yet there are ways around these issues and many of them probably are well within your means and abilities. More than that, measurement actually can be an upbeat exercise. And while we’re at it, the connection between dismal and economics may be faulty.

With the amount of tension in and attention on the Koreas, it was a serious interview. Professor Robert Kelly was expounding on the impeachment of South Korea’s president Park Geun-hye, during a live BBC broadcast. Kelly was sitting in his home study in Busan, S. Korea, talking with BBC News presenter James Menendez in London. As you may know, this interview eventually became a viral video. How can communicators’ video efforts compete with that?

Our weekly roundup of trends, news stories ad personnel moves in PR and communications. This week includes stories about a rogue tweet at McDonald’s, an update on Wells Fargo and Volkswagen and WE’s acquisitions in Asia.

Plagiarism happens, sometimes intentionally, other times accidentally. What do communicators need to know about plagiarism? And how can they avoid plagiarizing others? And, yes, themselves?

How does one become a next-generation CCO? Answering that question is the idea behind The New CCO Podcast, a series of conversations between CCOs from the Arthur W. Page Society. An advance copy of the series’ first podcast was made available to PRNews Pro. Below are some of its highlights.

Our weekly roundup of stories, trends and personnel moves in PR and communications. This week we feature a story timed to International Women’s Day, a reminder about why communicators need to monitor employees’ social media accounts 24/7 and a fond remembrance of Finn Partners’ Anne Glauber.

This was supposed to be a blog about another topic entirely. Yet the news we received late last night from a PR contact has prompted a different blog. To set the scene: your blogger had just returned from visiting a friend, hospitalized early Monday with an asthma attack that turned out to be heart trouble, which resulted in a triple bypass. Then, as your blogger sat down to finish writing the blog that should have been here, we received word from a PR friend that Anne Glauber, subject of a blog posted on this site months ago passed, aged 60, after a three-year battle with pancreatic cancer.

You might think branded content sites have little organization behind them. Perhaps that’s so at some sites. The branded content portal at monster.com is the opposite, however. Content and staff are organized into three groups: to raise awareness; to (gently) nudge readers to investigate what the site offers; and to assist those who are highly motivated to find jobs.

It’s too early to say with a lot of certainty, but it appears Uber has absorbed several PR lessons concerning crisis management. It’s had a fair amount of practice. The most recent incident for the SF-based company has Susan Fowler, a former employee, penning a widely circulated blog post about sexual harassment at Uber. It’s hard to fault the response of the company’s CEO, Travis Kalanick, this time. He’s taken several of the basic steps of crisis management and done so promptly.