Digital & Technology

Doing good for people in times of need can be tricky for brands. If you draw attention to a tragedy too much or in the wrong way, the public might accuse you of trying to score PR points. (And some brands might be doing just that.) Sometimes it helps the cause to draw more attention to it; sometimes the classy thing is to remain silent and speak through your actions.

Did you experience a sudden and sharp sense of FOMO last week? Then you should’ve been in San Francisco with PR News. An all-star lineup of speakers presented on topics ranging from SEO and Google Analytics to influencer marketing and Snapchat at the Big 4 Social Media Conference and Google for Communicators Boot Camp held at the San Francisco Grand Hyatt Aug. 9-10. Here’s a wrap-up of the two-day event, which showcased compelling video, top-notch speakers and networking opportunities galore.

We asked Katy Martin, senior account manager at Google, who chiefly works with large customers within consumer electronics verticals, to imagine a time-travel scenario: If she were talking to herself a year in the past and had to get that self up to date with AdWords, what would be the main takeaway?

Reality checked in with me recently when a few parents on my son’s rowing team, knowing my affiliation with PR News, asked me to write the press releases for the club. Sure, it’ll be easy,… Continued

More and more, users prefer a conversation to web browsing for their shopping and customer service needs. But for brands with large audiences, responding to each comment personally can be a nigh-impossible task. Enter the chatbot, a technology that’s rapidly coming into its own and turning into a valuable communications asset.

Amazon, Reddit, Netflix, Google: This is just the beginning of the list of prominent companies that have joined the chorus to call for the preservation of net neutrality on July 12, 2017, the “Day of Action.” But your brand may not seem to be as directly affected if it is not a content provider. How, then, is this controversy relevant to you?

When I ask my friends in PR what they’d do with a bigger budget, their first instinct is to smile that “yeah, right!” smile. It’s hard enough to keep the budget they have much less… Continued

If the lines between paid, owned and earned media have become blurred, why is the internal structure at most organizations still so linear? In this commentary, Brooks Thomas, social business advisor with Southwest Airlines, argues for a more integrated approach and provides four tips for smaller organizations looking to bust down the silos between those three types of content.

In the course of your career, you’ll have attended dozens if not hundreds of industry events where – if you’re like most human attendees – you’ve exchanged business cards as if by rote, refilled your… Continued

When people came up for air last week long enough to discuss something other than the tribulations of Misters Comey and Trump, a few of them spoke about Apple’s new HomePod. That was our cue to ask communicators if their brands are invested in voice activation. We also wondered if it’s time for communicators to begin making significant investments in voice activation.