Stories by Sophie Maerowitz

PR pros understand the importance of a great hook in storytelling. But how do you employ such hooks on Snapchat, where you have just one day to get noticed before that crucial opening moment disappears, along with the rest? Melanie Cohn of Dunkin’ Brands says that success lies in crafting an enticing hook that keeps audiences along for the ride, and following through with a matching payoff within the platform’s 24-hour window.

Facebook announced several new features in its latest Messenger update, a few of which may make it easier for brands to get their Messenger accounts discovered. The update includes simpler in-app purchases, a sharing option for individual messages and an introductory screen when users begin a Messenger interaction.

PR professionals are tasked with a lot these days. From writing traditional press releases and website copy, to crisis management and social media, the list of responsibilities seems to grow almost daily. It’s hard to know which skills communicators should be prioritizing to stay at the top of their field. For insight on this career-making question, we turned to the PR News community.

MSNBC correspondent Mike Barnicle asked Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson, “What would you do, if elected, about Aleppo?” To which Johnson responded, “What is Aleppo?” Within minutes, the former governor was being mocked on Twitter and covered by scores of online news outlets, many of which posited that the gaffe was an indication of a clueless foreign policy. From a PR perspective, it indicates a lack of media training.

A PR professional’s work is never done—especially considering the breakneck speed of digital communications. And on top of press and media relations duties, communicators are now also expected to stay on top of a growing list of social media accounts and metrics. With those hefty expectations in mind, we asked the PR News community for tips on effectively juggling a communicator’s responsibilities.

As the pool of full-time journalists continues to wane, today’s PR professional has to spend increasing amounts of time writing pitches that stand out from the masses. And for all of that effort, when a story does get picked up by a major outlet, it’s buried by a constant stream of other stories—often without enough time for it to generate adequate impressions for the resources spent. Which begs the question: Is it still worth it for PR professionals to prioritize earned media, or should they pour all of their resources into newer media channels instead?

Rumors have been circulating in tech blog circles this week that Apple has been developing a camera app-based social sharing tool to rival Snapchat and Instagram. Given the likelihood of the next generation of smartphone buyers to prioritize visual language—sharing photos and video over text—over text-based communications, this is a smart move for the tech giant, especially as Facebook and Google continue to grow in influence.

Pinterest has acquired Instapaper, an app for saving articles and pages for later reading. The matchup makes sense, given Pinterest’s parallel model of pinning images and video for later review. While there have been article and link-saving apps on the market for years, Instapaper has a few unique features that make it attractive to bigger platforms and potential buyers (this sale is its second acquisition in recent years), and several applications that make it worthwhile for communicators to keep an eye on in the long term.

Smart communications professionals prepare well-thought-out objectives and tactics in the planning phase before ever presenting a list of measurable outcomes to the C-suite. But before naming these objectives and tactics, PR professionals need to know exactly who their intended audience is. Building personas—semi-fictional representations of individual archetypes within a brand’s ideal audience—is a crucial step in pinpointing the ideal target group for any PR or communications campaign. Here are the three richest sources for persona building.

In a new move to establish itself as a player in visual media, Twitter has released promoted stickers for users to slap on photos, with Pepsi as its launch partner. Promoted stickers allow brands to design four to eight images that appear in the group of stickers users can scroll through and select when decorating photos in the app. Twitter’s blog pitches the branded stickers as “an opportunity for brands to drive brand affinity and raise awareness of their message at scale…to create an interactive experience.”