Digital & Technology

Each year Mary Meeker, a partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, puts together an exhaustive analysis of the latest online trends and the insights that can be gleaned from them. This year the report is a robust 355 pages—but here are a few of the important highlights for PR and marketing professionals.

Generating new and exciting content is essential to any social media strategy, but it’s no small feat. Brands spend a good chunk of their marketing budget on copywriters, agencies and influencers to build a library of rich, dynamic content that captures and captivates their audience’s attention. But there’s another way. Here, Vanessa Sain-Dieguez, senior director of HR digital strategy at Hilton Worldwide, shows how the hotel giant built a tribe of passionate content creators in-house.

In our regular feature about trends in PR and communications, Scott Sleek of the Association for Psychological Science discusses the changes his organization made at its web site when it determined the social media market had shifted.

Imagine this: attendees at a conference are flocking to a table filled with greeting cards where they can choose among “thank you,” “happy birthday” and “congratulations” greetings, write something nice (hopefully), lick the envelope and… Continued

Getting your brand covered fairly or favorably by a respected journalist in a respected media outlet—that’s what perceived authenticity used to be. It was the brass ring for communicators. Then the pool of full-time journalists… Continued

A salesperson, a PR manager and a marketer walk into a bar…or so your bottom line wishes. The birth of social media forced organizations to draw up new business strategies to stay competitive in the digital space. And so they did—one department at a time. Ask a salesperson what their social strategy is, or even what social media means to her profit goals and she will probably give you a completely different answer than the PR or marketing manager within the same organization. So how can you build a truly integrated communications team? By following these three steps.

Burger King has transformed a simple TV ad into a mouthwatering engagement goldmine…almost. The fast-food chain would have gotten away with it too, if it hadn’t been for those pesky kids at Google (and on the internet at large). On April 12, Burger King aired an ad in which an actor asks, “OK Google, what is the Whopper burger?” The line was intended to prompt Google Home devices to read a list of Whopper ingredients from Wikipedia, but anonymous pranksters edited the Whopper Wikipedia article to include some less-than-appetizing ingredients.

Journalists and influencers believe that factual content ranks higher with online audiences than emotional content, according to a recent Cision report. Yet at a panel discussion in New York this week, communicators said that emotionally driven content has undeniable power to attract audiences and can even build trust in a brand.

Timely content is king. The good news in today’s digital world is that companies are now in the content driver’s seat. But with so many channels and platforms at their disposal, many brands struggle to be relevant on all of them, all the time. That is leading some to make poor decisions about content type, timing and topic. Here are two examples of how Southwest Airlines strikes while the iron is hot.

Social media exposes many ironies, including the possibility that we are less social because of social media. Remember the days when we used our phone for talking, not typing? And when a friend was someone… Continued