Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Marketers may find themselves faced with a timely dilemma: What to do when the leader of the free world calls out your brand—or even your CEO—by name in a tweet? A year ago, the mere suggestion of that would be preposterous. Today, that’s not something outside of the realm of possibility.

The question is: How political do brands need to get in 2017? While the retail world may be the current battleground between the White House and the private sector, consumer packaged goods, tech and business-to-business leaders could be next. This is a new day in American politics, and we are just one month into the Trump presidency. Brands must ask themselves, where do we take a stand, why and to what end? And if I do take a stand, what risk do I take on with angering possibly half of my consumers?

While there are perhaps no easy answers, and the rule book has yet to be written, there are a few suggestions:

It is going to be difficult to disentangle corporate reputation challenges from the turbulent political environment in 2016. Whether it’s the Chinese currency crisis, the potential British exit from the EU, or the presidential election in the US, political events create lessons to learn and challenges to face for senior corporate communicators....

People who don’t understand PR tend to conflate it with media relations. While earning media coverage is just one of many PR activities, the profound changes shaking the news business are good news for public relations. There’s hardly an online news outlet that hasn’t taken steps to offer native advertising. The decimation of the ranks of paid journalists means more opportunity for brands to influence what gets coverage. The ability for companies to go directly to their audiences, bypassing the filter of the media, has reduced reliance on hostile outlets to tell company stories.

If you think all this presages a rosy future for the PR business, think again. As PR becomes an increasingly potent force for shaping the news people see, practitioners will need to be at least as accountable to the public as they are to their clients. The time has come to take the “public” in public relations seriously....

Investigating the gun industry, Muslim extremists, and high-stakes litigation, I’ve grown accustomed to deadline intimidation from corporate legal departments or an executive’s personal PR squad, but only this week am I getting a feel for what it’s like to be the target when a sovereign nation goes into crisis-communication mode.

Worried about revelations in Law of the Jungle, my soon-to-be-released book about the epic Chevron (CVX) oil pollution case, the Republic of Ecuador’s U.S. public relations advisers, New York-based Ketchum, has sent a six-page, single-spaced memo to Ecuador’s ambassador to the U.S., Nathalie Cely. Marked “reservado y confidencial,” the memo, prepared in Spanish throughout, outlines “difficult questions” the book raises “that negatively affect Ecuador,” and includes an ad hominem swipe. “It remains unclear when and how many times Barrett visited Ecuador or if he interviewed anyone from the Government,” the memo states. “This can be converted into a point that we can raise, but only in suitable settings and among appropriate journalists.”

I obtained a copy of the memo from a helpful noncombatant who works for neither Ketchum nor the ambassador and who requested anonymity for all the obvious and usual reasons. The damage-control document is a peculiar combination of advice on how to discredit the messenger—“this can be converted into a point …”—and admissions that the book raises issues that do not reflect well on Ecuador’s government....

Social media offered many opportunities for (quite justified) outrage this year. But did they come at a price?

...Here was instant comeuppance for someone who said something terrible. Here was comeuppance for a white person generalizing shallowly about Africa, the continent, as if it were one large country with only one story to tell. Here was a woman reveling in her whiteness and assuming that her whiteness was some kind of shield against a disease that does not discriminate. I was amused by the spectacle. I followed along even though something in my stomach twisted as the hours passed. It was a bit surreal, knowing this drama was playing out while Sacco was at 38,000 feet.

At the same time, I was horrified. It all felt a bit frenzied and out of control, as interest in the story mounted and the death threats and gendered insults began. The online outrage and Sacco’s comeuppance seemed disproportionate. The amount of joy some people expressed as they engaged with the #HasJustineLandedYet hashtag gave me pause.

Somewhere along the line, we forgot that this drama concerned an actual human being. Justine Sacco did not express empathy for her fellow human beings with her insensitive tweet. It is something, though, that the Internet responded in kind, with an equal lack of empathy. We expressed some of the very attitude we claimed to condemn....

What is thought leadership? It’s a question that I recently asked myself after reading about Michigan’s Lake Superior State University’s annual list of overused words and phrases that students deem worthy of banishment from the English language. Among the offenders in 2011 were some tried-and-true favorites (ginormous and man cave to name a couple), as well as relative newcomers to our daily vernacular like occupy (as in Zuccotti Park) and the new normal, a darling of Wall Street since the financial crisis.

All in all it’s not a bad list, but it seems to me that our friends at LSSU missed an obvious target. I’m talking about 17 letters that can be combined to form what has become a ubiquitous and, frankly, increasingly cliché term: thought leadership...

Ketchum’s staff members who provide public relations advice to Russia must avoid being seen as defending acts contrary to American interests while still providing some luster for a lucrative client.

In 2006, executives from the public relations firm Ketchum flew to Moscow to secure an account that has since been worth tens of millions of dollars.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had hired Ketchum to provide advice on public relations before the nation hosted the Group of 8 meeting in St. Petersburg. At the time, Mr. Putin “cared a great deal about what other leaders, especially presidents, thought about him,” said Michael A. McFaul, a former United States ambassador to Russia who now teaches at Stanford.

Times have changed. The escalating conflict between Russia and Ukraine has turned relations with the United States as frosty as they have been in years. Last week, President Obama said that as a result of the economic sanctions imposed on Russia, the country “is already more isolated than at any time since the Cold War.” And the United States ambassador to the United Nations called Russia’s actions in Ukraine a “threat to all of our peace and security.”

These six goals can be game changers for businesses and are all attributes that can be reinforced through the strategic use of social media.

One of the most valuable aspects of a solid social media engagement strategy and online presence is having the ability to build trust with consumers.

We have been writing a lot about that recently, whether its in the financial industry, the world of healthcare, or any vertical for that matter.  

Authenticity is key, and social media tools and platforms can help companies make authentic connections with their customers if they are used in the right way.

The 2014 Edelman Trust Barometer (from their annual global study) is out now, and it breaks down 16 specific attributes that businesses can improve on to build trust....

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A public relations executive for the prominent New York-based Internet media company IAC lost her job on Saturday after she posted a message joking about AIDS in Africa and race on her Twitter account, sparking an online furor.