Stories by Seth Arenstein

We take a look at food influencers and find that consumer engagement with their posts was down nearly 50% in the first quarter of 2018. Once again our data partner Shareablee provides the data exclusively to PR News.

Our weekly wrap of news, trends and personnel moves in communications and marketing. This week’s stories feature updates on Nike’s departure of senior male executives, Theranos, Volkswagen and the NY Times. In personnel news FlesihmanHillard creates a chief practice officer position.

eMarketer makes its predictions for global media spending, estimating rises for media spending overall and digital spending. N America will continue to lead spending, although Asia-Pacific will eclipse it around 2020, eMarketer says.

A cardinal rule of PR is for companies to be as transparent as possible. But how much is that? It depends, of course, but providing almost no transparency when something is afoot can spell trouble. More specifically it can lead to someone telling your story for you. For a few months Nike has refused to be transparent about significant departures from its senior ranks. The NY Times also initially had closed lips about the departure of one of its top editors. Transparency isn’t easy.

Our weekly roundup of news, trends and personnel moves in PR and marketing. This week’s stories include tough lessons in transparency for Nike and the NY Times, Southwest gets hit with a lawsuit from a passenger on flight 1380 and nine new partners at rbb Communications.

What can be done about fake news and who will do it? A new study shows Americans prefer a bit of fake news in their online media diet than letting Washington regulate freedom of information. They even prefer tech companies do the monitoring of fake news over government doing it.

Consumer engagement with social posts fell 50% in the first quarter of 2018, though audience figures rose, according to exclusive data provided to PR News by Shareablee.

Brand storytelling has changed from being about products to being about people, say our panel of storytelling pros. In addition, journalists are swamped and thinking about shareable content. The savvy PR pro can build a strong relationship with media by recognizing and reacting to this fact.

As communicators know, crisis communication begins well before a crisis occurs. Southwest’s communicators demonstrated they were prepared for April 17’s fatal incident aboard flight 1380 from NY to Dallas. Beyond their technical competence, Southwest used several tactics to inject a human touch in its crisis communications.

Our weekly roundup of news, trends and personnel moves in PR and marketing. This week’s stories include Mark Zuckerberg’s successful trip to DC, Marian Salzman’s moving to Switzerland and what PR firms fail to understand about inclusion and diversity.