Latest Posts

The annual South by Southwest (SXSW) conference—a week-long spectacle filled with experiential marketing stunts and immersive brand experiences that’s equal parts technology, education and entertainment—always offers plenty of style and substance for professional communicators. For those unable to attend, here are five fascinating live-streamed interviews and sessions that communicators will want to catch.

According to PR News’ 2018 Salary Survey, the most important skills for advancement in communications are written communications, media relations and content creation. Way down on the list, at No. 8, is measurement/data analysis skills. A roundtable conversation with 14 senior communications pros painted a different picture.

Strong writing skills can supercharge your brand’s message and propel your own professional growth. After all, the best way to influence anyone is a story well told. Yet, many communicators undermine their brand’s message—and their own credibility—by stumbling over some common but easily avoidable linguistic hurdles. Here are three common errors to keep in mind before you hit the send button.

Letting a social media influencer temporarily take over your brand’s accounts can be a great tactic to bring in new followers and engage with your audience in an authentic way. But there are some important tricks of the trade to keep in mind.

Our weekly roundup of news, trends and personnel announcements in communications and marketing. This week’s stories include U.S. Olympic Committee CEO Scott Blackmun’s dark departure, gymnast Ally Raisman’s lawsuit against her sport’s governing bodies and more trouble for Wells Fargo and Equifax.

Is the glass half full for communicators? The just-released PR News Salary Survey of some 900 communicators shows PR pros seem to be a satisfied group in terms of the money they make for the work they do. Base salaries best the average for American professionals and raises are rewarded often, although most are modest. On the other hand, more than a few communicators told us they weren’t completely satisfied with their salary. Finding the right balance of salary, bonuses, soft benefits and intangibles to recruit and retain the most talented staffers is an issue that adept communications leaders will continue to address.

In the fast-paced world of social media, careers can be made or broken in the blink of an eye—sometimes even the click of a button. The latter is the case with former Marriott social media employee Roy Jones, who has been fired for liking a Jan. 9 tweet by a group called Friends of Tibet, which drew the ire of the Chinese government and its supporters on social media.

At the Oscars, celebrity influences spoke out as conscious, mindful advocates instead of talking heads. Some of the most significant moments include the snubbing of Ryan Seacrest, a passionate advocation for dreamers and the suggestion of a rider that would make inclusion in productions a requirement. These tactics have implications that reverberate for beyond the Hollywood Hills.

The “Facebook Apocalypse” dominated conversations at Social Media Marketing World 2018, as brands prepare for a post-organic new world order. But for communicators, the future doesn’t have to be a dystopia of direct deposits into Facebook’s bank account. By mastering short-form and live video, focusing on storytelling and remembering to keep the humanity intact, your social media strategy can shift focus away from the brand and toward the consumer.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been around since the 1950s, though you’d think it’s brand new judging by the number of recent news articles mentioning it. Communicators can take advantage of AI now and they needn’t be engineers to do so, argues Jared Carneson, global lead, social innovation, for FleishmanHillard. There is a slew of tools that flirt with the AI space that can ease communicators’ workload. Carneson offers a look at several and urges communicators to experiment.