Stories by Seth Arenstein

Scarlett Johansson’s in hot water for accepting the role of a transgender character in the upcoming film “Rub & Tug.” Critics on social media and elsewhere contend the role should have gone to a transgender actor. The water temperature rose considerably after Johansson issued a curt reply to critics. Traditional PR recommends a more apologetic approach. Will Johansson’s rejoinder work?

Each month we ask communicators to unload their toolkits and tell us what falls out. In other words, What do you use to do your job? There are few better to talk about Facebook marketing than Ryder Meehan, principal & strategist, Meehan Digital, and a former social marketer at Fossil and Samsung, among others, and James Nickerson, lead instructor, digital marketing at General Assembly.

In our regular feature that looks at presentations, we present slides that offer suggestions on how to pitch media using social media. The thing is, don’t use social media to pitch. On the other hand, it can be very useful to research your targeted reporters and build relationships with them.

In each edition of PR News we highlight takeaways from an article or articles as well as additions to the PR News Resource Center, which is available only to subscribers at https://www.prnewsonline.com/subscriber-resources/

The CCO often is seen as a brand’s last line of defense, in theory supervising what the brand releases externally and monitoring and sometimes responding to what is said about the company outside the corporate walls. In the Netflix case, though, the CCO was the person who made the insensitive remarks. Twice.

Conventional wisdom held that brands should avoid weighing in on politics or social issues. But as research reports and surveys show, consumers now want brands to stand for something beyond goods and services. That said, brands wade into the political world on several levels, although they do so at their peril, and sometimes their motivation is unclear.

Back in October 2016 John Roderick observed that candidate Donald Trump had jettisoned the word “apology” from his campaign’s PR playbook. Nominee Trump refused to apologize and instead attacked accusers. That tactic worked well enough to propel Trump to victory. Now facing growing condemnation of his immigration policy separating children from families, Trump is sticking to that tactic. It will be interesting to see if/how he communicates a revision to immigration policy.

PR News and its Media Relations Working Group, comprised of 23 media relations and communications specialists, surveyed PR pros during March and April 2018 to gauge attitudes about media relations today and tomorrow. More than 400 responded to questions about the difficulty of obtaining media coverage, the importance (or not) of investing in media relations and earned coverage during an age of social media influencers and brand-created content.

It is unlikely we’ll read much about brand communicators working long hours as a spate of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) grips corporate America, particularly in media. Communicators will be tasked with explaining what a future merged company will mean to employees, which is the heavy lifting of M&As, argues Larry Parnell of George Washington University. While most M&As fail to provide shareholder value, strong internal communications can provide a foundation for mergers to succeed. Jason Meyer of APCO Worldwide provides best practices for communicating during times of change.

In one of his first public appearances since retiring as special counsel to President Trump, lawyer Ty Cobb during an ethics forum in Washington, D.C., offered conventional wisdom for brand communicators mired in a crisis: respond quickly. He also urged people to dial back their hate and demonization of each other in an effort to restore a civil discourse.