Digital & Technology

Each fall, PR News celebrates the top digital campaigns and initiatives of the last year at its Digital Awards luncheon. This year, the event will be held Nov. 8 at The Yale Club in New York City. Leveraging video, mobile apps, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and more, this year’s finalists have taken an unrivaled creative and tactical approach toward digital communications. Here is a list of this year’s finalists.

Asked what type of social video they watched most, consumers’ top three responses were telling: how-to videos, lists, and clips about sales and promos. Two of these video types also translate to strategies for engagement through editorial content—the reason people read so many listicles and how-to pieces is because they want to know, upfront, how the information you are providing benefits them. It’s unsurprising, then, that providing a service to your audience through how-to content and lists provides many happy returns in video form, too.

Money can’t buy you love and it can’t buy you passionate employees, but it surely can buy you more resources. When posed with the question of “What would you do with a 15% increase in… Continued

It’s still tough for some American communicators to tell just what all of this means for us, at least until we start to see some consequences from GDPR’s enforcement. Those consequences will arrive by end of year in the form of sanctions, though, according to European Data Protection Supervisor Giovanni Buttarelli.

The common thinking about digital literacy is that the younger you are, the more you understand it. Yet common sense is off the mark, according to a study of more than 7,000 students who struggled “mightily” to identify online content. Marketers need to understand why digital literacy is important to the bottom line and ensure they and their staffs have the skills and knowledge to use and recommend the best channels.

There’s more demand than ever for companies that specialize in teaching brands how to write for voice. A leader among them, PullString, built a platform that enables brands to create highly engaging voice applications for devices like Alexa and Google Home without writing any code.

Fashion e-commerce site Revolve filed an IPO this week. The site, which describes itself in the filing as a “next-generation fashion retailer for millennial consumers”, mentions the word influencers a whopping 79 times. Going public also brings on an increased level of scrutiny, and the need for Revolve to make sure its influencers are properly disclosing their relationships to the FTC. That has not always been the case.

Each month we ask communicators to unload their toolkits and tell us what falls out. In other words, what technologies and tools do they find most effective as they do their job? This month we talk technology and tools with Tejas Totade, head of emerging technologies at Ruder Finn, and Andrew Cross, VP, PR, at WalkerSands. Totade says voice will be the next big business technology.

Their edited responses to our questions about technologies and tools they use at their business and how they’d improve them are below.

Podcasts are no longer the new kid on the media block. Pitted against other platforms in the crowded media space, podcasts seem to be losing their luster, as several media outlets recently have doubled down on other formats and cut their podcast units. Podcasts, though, enjoy a level of listener loyalty and trust that other formats struggle with, making them a good bet for communicators seeking to spread their brand’s narrative.

Each month we ask communicators to turn over their toolkits and tell us what falls out. In other words, What tools and technologies are most effective to have when doing your job? We also ask