Digital & Technology

The organization formerly known as the Arthur W. Page Society—now it’s simply “Page”— hosted its annual Spring Seminar this week at New York City’s Conrad Hotel, bringing together communicators from across the globe for two days of panels, keynotes and breakout sessions that addressed the theme “Are You Future-Proofed? Disruption, Innovation and the CCO.”

At SXSW 2018, thanks to immersive experiences showcasing the massive advancements in augmented reality and virtual reality, attendees were afforded the opportunity to experience firsthand how close we are to the seemingly distant future we saw in movies like “Back to the Future Part II” and “Minority Report.” That future now seems to be only 22 months away.

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.

As a communicator, you can have a powerful impact on just about every corner of your organization by using the platforms, relationships and knowledge that you and your PR team are uniquely positioned to leverage.… Continued

Legendary Hollywood director John Huston was fond of saying that he didn’t direct actors—he cast them. He would cast actors because they were right for a particular role, and that judgment alone was the limit of his direction of their performances. You can apply this same approach to the ways in which your brand works with influencers. The bulk of the job is in finding and vetting the right influencers.

If the fragmented media environment is a sick patient, machine learning may be the cure. That was the proposition Andrew Heyward, visiting scholar from MIT’s Media Laboratory and former president of CBS News, outlined in his presentation, “Can Robots Solve Your PR Problems?” at the New York offices of agency Makovsky on Feb. 6.

Failure, my friends, is the F word I am referring to and the word that so many business leaders tout as the holy grail to get ahead. You’ve heard it so many times: fail fast, learn… Continued

Are you afraid to face your inbox, which probably is overflowing with email that’s of little or no use? And is the lack of a research assistant looking up names and addresses of key journalists slowing your workflow? Fortunately, it’s 2018 and there’s a bevy of tech tools that can help PR pros like you. Here are 12 that will raise your productivity immediately.

There’s a line in the movie “Molly’s Game” I think you’ll appreciate. As the young and future Olympic-level skier Molly Bloom was learning the sport from her father, he gave her this advice on the… Continued

Each January, the Consumer Electronics Show spotlights the most promising new technology on tap. But a few areas will get more stage time than others at next week’s event. So get those Google Alerts ready: Here are five topics being showcased at next week’s show that PR pros will need to stay on top of in 2018.