I promise that headline was the last ironic use of Gen Alpha slang you’ll hear from this elder Millennial.

But Generation Alpha, those born between 2010 and today, are rising. And they speak in their own unique way that PR professionals should understand — if only so they can avoid using it in a “how do you do, fellow kids?” sort of way.

New data from Morning Consult delves into the unique terminology this cohort uses, and we’ll break it all down. But first, let’s talk about Gen Alpha, and why you should already be paying attention to this generation of children.

About Gen Alpha

Gen Alpha is profoundly shaped by technology. The same could be true of both their Gen Z and Millennial ancestors, but Generation Alpha has a particular affinity for smartphones and tablets. They’ve never known a world without these touch-based devices.

Many are dubbed “iPad kids,” often derisively, for their parents’ habit of simply handing them devices to entertain them in social situations — and their frequently negative reactions when the stimulus is taken away. Their young lives were also profoundly shaped by the coronavirus, which caused many of them to spend their formative years in varying levels of lockdown and isolation.

Their economic impact is beginning already and is only expected to grow: by 2029, they’ll account for $5.46 trillion in spending. They’re also an extremely brand-savvy generation, and not necessarily the brands you might expect. As social media sites like TikTok and Instagram give kids more direct contact with adults, they start gravitating toward the same kinds of products that their elders enjoy. These are more likely to be Sephora and Ulta skincare aficionados rather than Toys R Us kids.

But it isn’t all about glowy complexions. Gen Alphas are also big gamers, and that love extends beyond the games themselves and into following their favorite streamers and chatting about their favorites. And they’re more likely to play on a cellphone than a fancy console.

Now that we’ve gotten to know Gen Alpha more, let’s dive into how they talk.

New generation, new slang

Every generation develops its own unique vernacular that they love and that profoundly irritates and befuddles the adults in their lives.

Gen Alpha is certainly no exception.

Morning Consult’s survey found that 29% of the parents of Gen Alpha (who are mostly Millennials, with a few Gen Zers thrown in for good measure) have heard their children use language they did not understand. This percentage increases as the child grows older, with 43% of parents of 8-10-year-olds scratching their heads over the words coming out of their children’s mouth. Children who socialize online are also far more likely to use confounding phrases than those who don’t (47% vs 23%).

And what are some of these neologisms the youths love so much?

You may have heard some of these. Heck, you may have used some of these. There aren’t bright generational lines around these terms; for instance, GOAT (Greatest of All Time, used to describe someone or something that’s very good) has been used in sports for years.

But let’s take a quick look at what these terms actually mean.

Bet: A term of agreement or being game for something: “Bet, let’s go!” Depending on tone, however, it can also be used to express doubt, according to Dictionary.com.

GOAT: As previously mentioned, this means the Greatest of All Time. It’s pronounced just like the animal and the adjective “goated” can also be used as a descriptor, USA Today reported. You might also see the goat emoji, which indicates the same thing.

Sus: Short for “suspect” or “suspicious” and conveying the same idea. While the slang term grew in popularity due to its use in pandemic-era game Among Us, it’s been around for nearly 100 years, Merriam-Webster said.

Bussin’: Something very good. Originates from African American Vernacular English (AAVE) on TikTok, according to Today.com.

Cap: Another AAVE term, cap means bragging or lying. No cap, however, means something is true or real.

Rizz: Dubbed the Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the year 2023, rizz means charm or attractiveness, particularly in a romantic sense. It possibly derives from the word “charisma.”

Gyat: Business Insider explains this is a compliment for a girl with a nice behind.

Sigma: Usually used in the phrase “sigma male,” it means an independent man or a lone wolf, according to Dictionary.com.

Lore: In this context, lore means the story behind something. It’s often used to describe the worldbuilding of TV shows and video games, according to very reputable source Urban Dictionary.

Ratio’d: Someone is ratio’d when the ratio of the replies on a piece of social media content is much bigger than the likes or shares on that post. Typically, it means someone did something dumb and is getting dragged for it.

Fanum tax: Named after streamer Fanum, this refers to stealing part of someone’s food.

If you choose to use these words, make smart decisions.

Allison Carter is editor-in-chief of PR Daily. Follow her on Twitter or LinkedIn.

The post By the Numbers: The slang Gen Alpha uses, no cap appeared first on PR Daily.

Sean O’Leary is vice president at Susan Davis International.

Everything about the site looked legitimate.

The reporter had a headshot. The article properly shared the news. But the use of one word gave away the fact it was all generated by artificial intelligence.

Earlier this year, our agency sent out a press release for a client about three new leaders joining the company. As we reviewed the news clips, a new site popped up in our results. We hadn’t heard about the site and were initially excited.

Then we read the lede. The company had not hired a “trio” of new leaders – it had hired a “trinity” of new leaders. There’s not a human reporter alive who would ever refer to three new business leaders like that.

Indeed, it wasn’t a human reporter. Everything about the article was AI-generated, including the “headshot” of the “person” who “wrote” the story.

The phenomenon of AI-generated news is not new, as evident by the Sports Illustrated scandal late last year when the once-revered outlet was reduced to publishing AI-generated articles and attempting to sneak it past an unsuspecting public.

Most would agree that journalistic best practices would indicate a proper news outlet should make the reader aware if AI was responsible for the article they’re reading. But what if the entire outlet is AI-generated?

For PR professionals, we almost always want to expand the media footprint for our clients, and more sources of coverage are good. For this particular article in question, there was nothing wrong with it, other than the bizarre use of the word trinity. It showed up in Google News. It showed up in our media monitoring. There was nothing negative.

On one hand, I should be happy as a PR professional. We got an extra article for a client that was delivered to people around the world. For a majority of the general public, they do not know they’re reading an AI-generated article.

On the other hand, there’s a helpless feeling. An AI-generated news story can be good, but what if it’s bad? What if it starts needlessly sharing incorrect or unfavorable coverage to the masses?

As we enter the AI age of news media, here are a couple of tips for PR professionals.

Educate your clients on the AI media landscape

Even the savviest communication leader can be fooled by a strong AI-generated article. The first step in approaching AI-generated news is to educate everyone involved about what’s going on. Although they may be aware of AI news articles, they may not have experienced one personally.

For most AI-generated news, there is no action item beyond education. An article in these publications does not register on the same level as a legitimate, established outlet, but the average person reading these articles may not know that. As long as the news is correct, it’s simply bonus coverage.

Review every AI-generated article

However, just because one AI-generated article was good does not mean they all will be. While it’s always best practice to review articles to ensure your client’s news is presented factually and correctly, it’s even more critical with AI articles.

One such instance happened last fall, when an AI-generated news article popped up about a client’s annual sustainability report. Unfortunately, the AI-generated article published a story on the 2022 annual report as if it were released in 2023.

This was not an easy correction, as AI reporters are notoriously hard to track down. Instead, our team had to reach out to multiple salespeople at the site until finally reaching a human being who could remove the article completely. Ultimately, we were successful and there was little to no impact of the false article – but it was a warning sign.

Stay current with AI trends

By the time you read this article, there might be a new AI trend emerging in journalism. We’re only starting to scratch the surface of generative AI, with altered photos impacting Presidential campaigns and the most famous pop star on Earth.

There will be more AI-generated news sites, more AI-generated news articles, and more AI-generated news reporters. That much, I know. The rest? I’m not sure.

AI has the potential to completely upend and disrupt the news media. For public relations, that means our industry could be upended and disrupted too.

We can’t predict the future of AI. We can be prepared.

The post PR pros must prepare for the rise of AI journalism appeared first on PR Daily.

Nonprofit communicators have some of the most compelling stories to share. Their messages support efforts that transcend a simple bottom line.

We’ve highlighted some of the first-place winners from last year’s Ragan PR Daily Nonprofit Communications Awards to take a closer look at their tactics and successes. Be sure to apply to this year’s awards before submissions close on April 5.

Best Media Relations Campaign: Brodeur Partners — Returning to the Boston Marathon Course

The situation: The Boston Marathon’s Jimmy Fund Walk is a heralded event in New England each year. Benefiting the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, the walk usually takes place along the famed route of the Boston Marathon. But when the COVID pandemic broke out, the walk ended up being canceled in favor of a virtual event in both 2020 and 2021. When the walk returned to the course, Brodeur Partners needed to ensure that the word got out in a big way.

The solution: To celebrate the walk’s return, Brodeur looked for the faces that made the walk a special event. The team looked through hundreds of submissions to find the right walker stories, eventually identifying 257 walkers and listening to 70 unique walker accounts to gain a better perspective on the cancer battles and courage that led people to the walk.

The campaign also leveraged influencers to help spread the story of the walk’s return throughout the Boston area. One notable influencer on the campaign was Spencer the Dog, at the time the official dog mascot of the Boston Marathon.

Brodeur’s work paid off, earning nearly a thousand media placements, including two in the Boston Globe and a feature in the Boston Herald, in addition to millions of impressions.

The takeaway: Highlighting the people who make a difference in a nonprofit campaign is just as important as communicating about the campaign itself.

Best Public Affairs Campaign: FleishmanHillard and AARP — The Fight for Fair Rx Prices

The situation: Americans spend more on their prescriptions than any other country in the developed world. This issue is particularly pronounced for Americans over 65, with 3.5 million older people in the U.S. struggling to afford their medications.

The solution: In collaboration with FleishmanHillard, AARP created a target media campaign following President Biden’s highlighting of drug pricing reform in his 2022 State of the Union Address. Titled “Fair Rx Prices Now,” the campaign called upon Congress to take action on pricing reform, highlighting women over 50 as an important voting bloc. Fair Rx Prices Now earned 340,000 earned media placements and over 620 million impressions.

The joint campaign helped influence the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which included provisions for drug price negotiation, expanded vaccine coverage, and capped insulin costs. AARP CEO Jo Ann was also invited to the law’s signing ceremony in honor of the organization’s contributions.

The takeaway: Strategic collaborations can expand the scope of what’s possible to make a meaningful difference.

Nonprofit Communications Campaign of the Year: Stop AAPI Hate — No Place for Hate

The situation: The COVID pandemic saw an unfortunate rise in hate crimes against people of Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) descent.

The solution: Stop AAPI Hate, which documents incidents of hatred against AAPI people, launched No Place for Hate. This campaign aimed to shift the burden of these hateful incidents away from individuals and towards public agencies that can help.

The campaign had two main goals. The first was the passage of two bills in California co-written by Stop AAPI Hate to further the conversation about stopping street harassment. The other was to increase awareness around harassment in the public forum.

The campaign featured virtual and in-person events with people discussing the issues of street harassment across different communities. Additionally, there was a social media aspect to the campaign, in which people held whiteboards that had a blank space after “I want a #SaferPlace to _____”. These images were displayed both in public spaces and across social platforms.

The legislative push succeeded when in late 2022, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed both bills into law. The campaign also secured more than 120 media hits across local, state, and national outlets such as the San Francisco Chronicle and NBC News.

The takeaway: Supporting a just cause that’s focused on one specific community can create impact that resonates across multiple communities.

Read more here.

Sean Devlin is an editor at Ragan Communications. In his spare time he enjoys Philly sports, a good pint and ’90s trivia night.

The post Lessons from Ragan Nonprofit Communications Awards winners appeared first on PR Daily.

Joseph Abreu is the chief communications officer for the clerk of the court & comptroller of Lee County in Fort Myers, Fla., overseeing strategic communications, public affairs, media relations, emergency management, and reputation/brand management. He is also the PRSA’s 2024 Chair. Abreu has served for over 17 years in leadership roles with PRSA, including five years on the national board.

 Before his CCO role, he directed communication efforts for the clerk & comptrollers of St. Lucie and Palm Beach counties. He managed communications and development for Compass, a prominent LGBTQ community center.

Abreu has been recognized with awards like the PRSA Sunshine District’s Trailblazer Award and the PRSA Palm Beach Chapter’s Hall of Fame Award, Abreu’s campaigns have garnered over 40 national, state, and local accolades.

The thing I’m most excited about for the future of my profession is:

I’m excited about how new technologies, like artificial intelligence and augmented reality, will continue to impact the way public relations professionals work in the near future. These new tools will give us unique opportunities to work faster, produce more content, develop personalized messaging and engage audiences.

One thing that worries me about the future of my profession is:

As much as I embrace AI and other burgeoning technologies, I do worry about how they will amplify mis- and disinformation in our societies. We are already highly susceptible to misleading and false statements, but when it is made with authentic voices and videos, it will be even harder for people to discern between truth and lies. As public relations professionals, we will have to work together to combat unethical practices.

A tool or a piece of software I cannot live without is:

My iPhone. Like many PR professionals, I need to be accessible as well as be able to access the internet, email, and social media – right at my fingertips. I often use my phone to take notes, create videos, and manage all my finances.

The most underrated skill in my profession is:

Financial literacy. If you go into communications without a strong understanding of numbers, you will limit your growth. Communications executives must be comfortable with budgets, P&L statements and balance sheets. We also need to be able to measure our results against the bottom line and prove our value in the C-suite. 

One way I stay creative and motivated is:

Graphic design is a skill that can truly benefit communicators, and I have been proficient in many Adobe programs for nearly 20 years. It gives me a creative escape from everyday work, and the artistry allows me to recharge and better contribute to my team.

Someone who has helped me be successful in my career is:

 My husband. He has always been encouraging and supportive of my career and my passions in life, whether it be volunteering for PRSA for the past 18 years or moving across the state for a new career opportunity. He helps me stay positive in the toughest times, and I wouldn’t be where I am without him.

Isis Simpson-Mersha is a conference producer/ reporter for Ragan. Follow her on LinkedIn.

The post How I Got Here: PRSA’s 2024 Chair Joseph Abreu embraces innovation appeared first on PR Daily.

Off the record, on the record, on background. The terms are commonplace for PR professionals but are often used incorrectly. And that can be very dangerous.

I’ve dealt with various record requests as a PR rep, as an editor and as a reporter myself. These terms can be confusing. Use the below guide to ensure you understand – but perhaps more importantly, include this as part of your media training for clients and principals. A confident executive saying “well, this is off the record, BUT” could well wind up as front-page news tomorrow.

Basic definitions

On the record is the default status for talking to a reporter in a professional capacity. It means anything you say in an interview can be quoted and reported on, with your name attached. You should assume that anything you say to a reporter is on the record unless they have stated otherwise.

That part is important, so let me repeat it, this time in bold: you should assume that anything you say to a reporter is on the record unless they have stated otherwise.

Off the record is, of course, the flip side of that. Nothing in that conversation should be included in coverage, either as a direct quote, a summary or a reference. Nothing.

Finally, the last status is on background, which is the most complicated terminology. On background often means that the information may be used either via quote or a summary, but without a specific name attached. This is often used to not put the focus on a person, such as attributing a quote to “a company spokesperson” as opposed to “Jane Doe, head of communications.”

A less common term you may hear is “deep background.” The AP defines this as, “The information can be used but without attribution. The source does not want to be identified in any way, even on condition of anonymity.” This is often used when a journalist needs to speak to a subject matter expert to understand a topic enough to write about it with authority, but the identity of that expert doesn’t necessarily need to be in the story.

When in doubt about the definitions of any of these terms, ask up front.

A journalist’s obligation

In a perfect world, a journalist will always make the record status of a conversation clear. I like to tell people upfront, “I’ll be using this in an article, so everything we discuss is on the record. Is that OK?” It’s also fine to make it clear that nothing you say is on the record: “Hey, this is just a getting-to-know you chat, so let’s stay off the record unless we both decide something comes up that’s worth reporting on. Is that OK?”

But not all reporters do this. So again, assume that anything you say to a reporter is on the record unless otherwise negotiated.

Because going off the record or on background is always a negotiation. And it must happen before you say whatever you don’t want to be reported.

Reporters have an ethical obligation to preserve a source’s trust by respecting agreements about going off the record or on background. Breaking that rule is considered a deep faux pas. But that does not mean you can simply preface a statement by saying, “this is off the record” and expect that to be respected. Both sides must say yes.

There have been several high-profile situations, including one that involved Elon Musk, where sources sent emails to reporters flagging information within as “off the record.” But because the reporter in question never agreed to be off the record, they published the contents of those emails. They were within their ethical rights to do so. You also generally can’t say something, then backtrack with “that was off the record.”

It’s rarely to your advantage to go off the record with a reporter. Even if they can’t report what you told them off the record, they can investigate it and try to find an on-the-record source. But if you do want to give it a try, approach it like this:

“I’d like to go off the record with my response because…Will you accept those terms until we both agree to go on the record again?”

Get a clear yes or no. And if it’s a no, then move on. Change topics.

The trouble with background

Again, background is the squishy middle ground between on and off the record. Some  journalists have grown sick of it.

In 2021, The Verge updated its public ethics policy to change its stance around “on background” reporting. As the outlet’s editor-in-chief, Nilay Patel, wrote at the time:

There are many reasons a reporter might agree to learning information on background, but importantly, being on background is supposed to be an agreement.

But the trend with big tech companies now is to increasingly treat background as a default or even a condition of reporting. That means reporters are now routinely asked to report things without being able to attribute them appropriately, and readers aren’t being presented with clear sources of information.

This all certainly feeds into the overall distrust of the media, which has dire consequences in our current information landscape, but in practice, it is also hilariously stupid.

It’s worth reading the full story for some deeply cringey examples of PR professionals demanding to be on background in ridiculous ways. Don’t be one of them.

The Verge clarified that it will only accept on background requests “at our discretion and only for specific reasons that we can articulate to readers.”

While it may be awkward for PR professionals, it’s good for journalism. The public’s ability to evaluate the credibility of a source by knowing who they are is vital. If you aren’t comfortable with putting a name to your spokesperson (whoever they may be), you need to reevaluate your strategy.

Remember: reporters are not your friend. They are professionals there to get a story. Most aren’t out to burn you either, but protect yourself and your organization by deeply understanding and aggressively negotiating these terms.

Get more expert insight into smartly working with the press during PR Daily’s Media Relations Conference, June 6 in Washington, D.C.

Allison Carter is editor-in-chief of PR Daily. Follow her on Twitter or LinkedIn.

The post How to safely go off the record with a reporter appeared first on PR Daily.

This story has been updated to clarify that Griner has not conducted one-on-one interviews since her return. 

Securing the release of WNBA star Brittney Griner from wrongful detention in Russia was a monumental feat of politics and negotiations.

But PR also played a critical role.

“It was about screaming from the mountaintop and trying to have the public and ultimately the government and White House pay attention to us, because we knew that without the government support and the support of the White House, she probably wasn’t going to come home,” Calder Hynes told PR Daily. Hynes is senior vice president of global communications at Wasserman, the sports and entertainment talent agency that has represented Griner for years.

Wasserman coordinated efforts to release Griner from her nearly 10-month imprisonment in Russia, a massive undertaking that required working with not only the government, international attorneys and hostage experts, but also the WNBA, USA Basketball and the court of public opinion.

In an interview with PR Daily, Hynes and Griner’s longtime agent Lindsay Kagawa Colas revealed how they worked to first keep the incident quiet – and then how to ensure every American viewed Griner as their sister, daughter or neighbor.

This story was in part developed based on reporting from “Inside Brittney Griner’s Russia arrest, detainment and release,” written by ESPN’s T.J. Quinn, for details around Griner’s arrest and detention. All quotes with Kagawa Colas and Hynes are from interviews with PR Daily.

An early morning call and an international incident

Kagawa Colas was awakened early one morning by a call from a colleague. There was a problem. The information they had was slim, just a text from Griner’s wife, Cherelle, that the basketball star had been arrested as she returned to Russia to kick off her play with UMMC Ekaterinburg due to her possession of two marijuana vape cartridges.

Brittney Griner and Lindsay Kagawa Colas after Griner’s release from Russian detention. Photo provided by Wasserman.

At first, this was just another problem to solve. A day in the life of a sports agent.

“We were still hoping that this was going to be a sports diplomacy issue that could be solved,” Kagawa Colas told PR Daily. “Some misunderstanding. She has a prescription for this medically prescribed cannabis oil. I’m sure we can figure this out.”

“The initial (PR) approach was, let’s try to keep this out of public knowledge. Move past it,” Hynes recalled.

But the timing meant that this would be more than a minor drug bust. Griner was detained on Feb. 17, 2022.

One week later, Russia invaded Ukraine.

From quiet to loud

For more than two weeks, few people outside Griner’s immediate circle knew of her detention. But on March 5, Russia itself broke the news of her detention, forcing her team’s hand.

“That was one of those early signals that she was a political pawn,” Kagawa Colas said. “And they were going to start using this as a negotiation.”

That began a new, cautious phase of efforts. The team wanted to correct misinformation and advocate for Griner, but they didn’t want to exacerbate the situation unnecessarily.

“It was more about being factual, trying to provide the public and the press with what they needed, keep them close, while at the same time not trying to go out there with an agenda or pushback about why she’s there, or why she isn’t, or what the treatment is in regards to her safety,” Hynes said. “We couldn’t really start a back and forth with the Russian government.”

But the months of Griner’s confinement dragged on. By August, she had been sentenced to a staggering nine years’ incarceration. By November, she was transferred to a Russian labor camp, where she was tasked with carrying bolts of cloth — she was too tall to perform the sewing other women did — and breaking ice. The cold weather required her to cut her trademark locs after they kept freezing.

At home, the campaign to bring her home began to ramp up.

“Early, it was ‘be quiet,’” Kagawa Colas remembered. “‘Let’s not raise her value. Let’s see if we can resolve this quietly.’ Then it was, ‘if we want to keep her visible and make sure she’s a priority at the White House, how do we do that without compromising the White House and compromising the negotiation?’”

One issue — and opportunity — was Griner’s identity. She is Black. She is a lesbian. She presents in ways that are gender-nonconforming. That allowed Biden’s political opponents to turn her into a wedge issue to strike at the president, with the fires further stoked by Russian-backed bots on social media. The more controversy around her, the more she could be used as a pawn by Vladimir Putin and his regime. But the team had to speak up. The time for silence had passed.

“How do we simultaneously decrease her value in a trade to make a trade easier, while also ensuring she’s a priority? That is a needle to thread,” Kagawa Colas said.

The answer was a campaign that emphasized unity.

‘BG is for everybody’

The Wasserman team decided that Griner’s multi-layered identity was an asset, not a liability.

“Maybe you can’t see yourself in Brittney Griner, but we’re going to tell you why you actually can,” Kagawa Colas said. In the PR campaign, they emphasized that Griner is the daughter of a veteran and a former law enforcement officer. Her favorite holiday is the Fourth of July. She’s an American hero, having won two Olympic gold medals for her country.

But her Blackness and her sexuality were not avoided either. The Wasserman team said these were obvious reasons that she was detained. As a result, Black women in media became some of the most valuable and powerful voices in the campaign.

“They intimately understood the story,” Hynes said. “And they understood the challenges more easily. They were much more understanding and open to covering the story with a little bit more of a personal connection. But more than anything, we didn’t need to go through all the explanation to them about the lesson. The whys of all this.”

And some did use Griner’s identity to tear her down or even say she should remain in Russia. But the Wasserman team tried to stay above the fray, pointing out that Griner has rights as an American and if you believe in those rights, you should be advocating for her.

The other challenge was that Griner, locked up in Russia, could not speak for herself. She needed advocates. One of those was Kagawa Colas. The other key player was Cherelle Griner, Brittney’s wife.

“Cherelle was just an average American person, had not been a public figure, had not been in the limelight, had not done any media and not really engaged,” Hynes said. “And we were all of a sudden asking her to do an interview on ‘Good Morning America’ with Robin Roberts.”

The Wasserman team helped with media training, giving Cherelle the tools she needed as quickly as possible to succeed in a difficult role. From looking the part to telling her emotional story clearly, she got a crash course — and succeeded.

“Talk about a person who has the utmost strength in all this,” Hynes said. “Cherelle just really delivered.”

Beyond the media relations, there were rallies and events in Arizona, where Griner still plays with the Phoenix Mercury WNBA team, and partnerships with the NBA. Every measure was meant to ensure that attention stayed on Griner and the public remained invested in the effort to bring her home. #WeAreBG was used as a rallying hashtag to encourage others to advocate for and see themselves in Griner, used by both regular people and celebrities like NBA star Carmelo Anthony to keep her name in the news.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Carmelo Anthony (@carmeloanthony)

And then in December, nearly 10 months after Griner was stopped at customs in Moscow, officials reached a deal. Her freedom was secured in exchange for Viktor Bout, a Russian arms dealer serving a federal prison sentence.

Freedom

When Griner was returned to the United States and reunited with her wife, the team took a moment to celebrate.

“It was overwhelming. It was confusion. It was excitement. It was just pure joy,” Hynes said. “I got very emotional, and I cried because I don’t think I understood how much pent-up emotion I had over this.”

But the moment of celebration was brief. There was still a great deal of work to do.

Even choosing which photo of Brittney and Cherelle reuniting would be released to the media had to be carefully orchestrated.

“We wanted to balance both the historic significance of the moment, the personal, emotional side that grounds the story, and I think they’re the most compelling,” Hynes said.

Brittney Griner reunites with her wife Cherelle after spending nearly 10 months in detention in Russia. Photo provided by Wasserman.

The military and the government were involved, necessitating time and sensitivity as Griner readjusted. But there were also hundreds of interview requests pouring in. So far, Griner has stuck to press conferences and has not yet sat for one-on-one interviews.

“We all realized very quickly that obviously getting her home was the goal, but in her larger story and for our dealing with her, if you want to put it in the context of a PR campaign, it was actually only the first phase. It’s on to this whole next chapter of Brittney’s life,” Hynes told PR Daily.

But overall, Hynes said the campaign reaffirmed his belief in the power of PR to accomplish important things.

“It was gratifying that it seemed like a true-blue PR campaign, even today, can have a really tangible impact on this really positive outcome.”

The return

Griner returned to the court for the 2023 WNBA season, where she shot a career-high 61.8% and was again named an All-Star. Her memoir, “Coming Home,” will be released later this year.

“Coming Home begins in a land where my roots developed and is the diary of my heartaches and regrets,” Griner said in a statement about the book. “But, ultimately, the book is also a story of how my family, my faith, and the support of millions who rallied for my rescue helped me endure a nightmare.”

A documentary with Disney and ESPN on her experiences is also forthcoming. And so, Kagawa Colas says, is a new emphasis on activism and helping other people who are wrongfully detained, including Paul Whelan and Evan Gershkovich.

“We’d like to think that awareness around wrongful detention has been raised,” Kagawa Colas said. “And we helped people gain a better understanding of how important it was to do whatever is necessary to get Americans home. I hope that’ll be a part of her legacy, how many people have come home in the wake of her detention and our campaign bringing her home.”

Because as Hynes pointed out, basketball is only one part of the greater arc of Griner’s life.

“(The detention) is a core part of her identity. Her whole image and persona is just shifted now and long term for her. A lot of this is about setting her up for what she wants to do when she’s ultimately done playing. Who is she gonna be?”

Allison Carter is editor-in-chief of PR Daily. Follow her on Twitter or LinkedIn.

The post The PR team who helped bring Brittney Griner home on how they kept her in the headlines appeared first on PR Daily.

Vice President and leader of the AI, Big Data, and Cloud software team at 10Fold‘s Austin office, Caitlin Haskins has over 16 years of expertise in public relations. Recognized as a “Dynamic Do-er” in the PR Daily & Ragan Communications Top Women in Communications Awards in 2022, she is passionate about achieving impactful results.

Outside of her professional endeavors, Haskins finds joy in digging for fossils with her three children, savoring the flavors of Austin’s breakfast tacos, or pursuing her dream of mastering the art of the perfect sourdough loaf.

The moment I’m proudest of in my entire career is when I:

See a company grow to the next stage – whether that’s completing an exit or acquisition or simply continuing to build. Taking a company from stealth to exit is especially satisfying when you know that the brand awareness and third-party recognition that we generated played an important role in those milestones. It’s powerful to bring innovations that are truly world-changing to market – especially now as we are on the cusp of so many new applications in the AI space.

A tool or a piece of software I cannot live without is:

Google Gemini. While the application’s gotten some flack in the last week or two for inaccuracies with image generation, I use it to quickly vet ideas, identify supporting statistics from credible sources, and more. I don’t find it to be as successful with content generation or as “creative” as ChatGPT, but it speeds up my work, nonetheless.

The key to excellence in storytelling is:

Creating a human connection. Working in deep tech, we tend to quickly get stuck on the business narrative around software and solutions. However, reporters – and prospective buyers – are all people first. If we can shed light on their day-to-day experiences and how technology is creating conflict or making things better, our story is much more likely to resonate.

My professional motto/mantra is:

Never stop experimenting. What keeps me energized and moving forward is the ability to try new things – with my clients as they seek novel ways to educate their markets, with our agency marketing and with my team. Our world is changing quickly – if I’m not trying several new things each quarter, at best I can expect to stand still or even fall behind. I want to be known as a leader who isn’t afraid to try new things and is constantly learning.

A book or song that changed the way I think about my career is:

The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller. One of the things I love about working in an agency is that every day is different. I have the opportunity to tackle a new set of challenges every day and that makes every day move fast. The challenge is that it’s easy to get “shiny penny syndrome” and lose track of the tasks that move the needle amidst all the rest. This book helped me understand that if I could build a stronger focus on critical tasks, I would make much more progress toward my goals and help our business move forward.                           

When I’m feeling overwhelmed at work, I:

 Remind myself that this is temporary. Things get busy and that’s a good thing – it means we have opportunity and I just need to take each piece apart to understand how I will prioritize my time. What can only I do? What can be handed off to a team member with little impact on quality or end result? The biggest mistake we can make in this field is not letting go. Letting go of a task could give a team member an opportunity to try something new. Or, given the circumstances, I may need to “let go” of the way I’d prefer to get things done – I’m analytical and like to move deliberately – to get the job done the way it should. I communicate my plan to execute with my CEO and then stop stressing – it’s time to get it done!

Isis Simpson-Mersha is a conference producer/ reporter for Ragan. Follow her on LinkedIn.

The post How I Got Here: 10Fold’s Caitlin Haskins leads with curiosity appeared first on PR Daily.

Muck Rack’s annual State of Journalism report is a must-read for any By the Numbers fan. It’s chock full of useful data on how journalists work, the state of their industry, their views on AI and much more.

But let’s be real. You’re mostly curious about the section on pitching and why you aren’t getting any darn responses.

The problem with pitching

Here’s the good news: Journalists value PR pros. The survey, which received responses from more than 1,100 journalists, primarily from the U.S., found that 70% believe that journalists are at least somewhat important to their work. After all, PR pros can help reveal interesting trends, connect reporters to experts, offer viral promotions and more.

But that doesn’t mean pitches are always helpful. In fact, 49% of respondents said they seldom or never respond to pitches. Twenty-four percent said they respond about half the time, 18% usually do and 8% always do.

Cheers to the 8%.

And it certainly isn’t due to lack of pitches that journalists aren’t responding. Forty-nine percent of respondents said they get at least six pitches per day, with 12% contending with a whopping 21 or more pitches every day. Perhaps those who are combatting 100 or more pitches on a weekly basis can be forgiven for not always giving a response.

But by far and away, the biggest reason journalists don’t respond to pitches is that they simply aren’t relevant to their coverage area. Seventy-nine percent cited lack of relevance as the top reason they’ll deny a pitch, which reveals a serious problem with targeting in the PR industry.

“Spray and pray” is not an effective pitching method. If you’re still reporting how many pitches you’re distributing, you’re measuring the wrong thing. Better to distribute a handful of pitches to vetted journalists rather than risk becoming one of these forgotten, mis-targeted attempts cluttering an inbox forever.

So, what does make for a good pitch besides smart targeting?

There isn’t an easy formula for this. The vast majority (83%) do prefer to be pitched 1-1 via email rather than in a mass barrage or via phone. But beyond that, there’s little consensus for a day of the week (64% say they have no preference) or time of day (44% say before noon, but that leaves plenty who prefer a time after noon). There is a preference for shorter — 65% prefer pitches that are less than 200 words. And a slim majority (51%) say you should only follow up once, preferably within 3-5 days.

Beyond that, you’ll likely want to focus on building a relationship and just ask your identified reporters when and how they want to be pitched. Every journalist is a unique human being with their own personal preferences and job requirements. The best thing to do is simply to ask — and to be empathetic.

Because journalists are dealing with a lot.

A journalist’s life in 2024

Everyone is busy. Let’s get that out of the way. But journalists are becoming even more intensely worked as their numbers dwindle while the pile of news to be reported on seems to grow ever larger.

Muck Rack’s survey found that 36% of journalists have dealt with layoffs or other downsizing at their organization in the last year. Sixty-four percent work more than 40 hours a week, and 79% report working outside the standard 9-5 hours. Many (46%) do all this for less than $70,000 per year.

They’re also turning in a great deal of work, though the exact volume of the stories they produce can vary widely. Thirty-six percent produce a reasonable five stories or less per week, but 22% are responsible for 11 or more, a massive workload. Add that on top of their bulging inboxes and it all makes for a difficult, stressful career.

Read the full Muck Rack report here.

To further hone your pitching, join us for PR Daily’s Media Relations Conference in Washington, DC June 5-6.

Allison Carter is editor-in-chief of PR Daily. Follow her on X or LinkedIn.

The post By the Numbers: What journalists really think of your pitches appeared first on PR Daily.

AI continues to shape our world in ways big and small. From misleading imagery to new attempts at regulation and big changes in how newsrooms use AI, there’s no shortage of big stories.

Here’s what communicators need to know. 

AI risks and regulation

As always, new and recurring risks continue to emerge around the implementation of AI. Hence, the push for global regulation continues.

Consumers overwhelmingly support federal AI regulation, too, according to a new survey from HarrisX. “Strong majorities of respondents believed the U.S. government should enact regulation requiring that AI-generated content be labeled as such,” reads the exclusive feature in Variety. 

But is the U.S. government best equipped to lead on regulation? On Wednesday, the European Parliament approved a landmark law that its announcement claims  “ensures safety and compliance with fundamental rights, while boosting innovation.” It is expected to take effect this May.

The law includes new rules banning applications that threaten citizen rights, such as biometric systems collecting sensitive data to create facial recognition databases (with some exceptions for law enforcement). It also requires clear obligations for high-risk AI systems that include “critical infrastructure, education and vocational training, employment, essential private and public services, certain systems in law enforcement, migration and border management,” and  “justice and democratic processes,” according to the EU Parliament.

The law will also require general-purpose AI systems and the models they are based on to meet transparency requirements in compliance with EU copyright law and publishing, which will include detailed summaries of the content used for training. Manipulated images, audio and video will need to be labeled.

CNBC reports:

Dragos Tudorache, a lawmaker who oversaw EU negotiations on the agreement, hailed the deal, but noted the biggest hurdle remains implementation.

“The AI Act has pushed the development of AI in a direction where humans are in control of the technology, and where the technology will help us leverage new discoveries for economic growth, societal progress, and to unlock human potential,” Tudorache said on social media on Tuesday.

“The AI Act is not the end of the journey, but, rather, the starting point for a new model of governance built around technology. We must now focus our political energy in turning it from the law in the books to the reality on the ground,” he added. 

Legal professionals described the act as a major milestone for international artificial intelligence regulation, noting it could pave the path for other countries to follow suit.

Last week, the bloc brought into force landmark competition legislation set to rein in U.S. giants. Under the Digital Markets Act, the EU can crack down on anti-competitive practices from major tech companies and force them to open out their services in sectors where their dominant position has stifled smaller players and choked freedom of choice for users. Six firms — U.S. titans Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft and China’s ByteDance — have been put on notice as so-called gatekeepers.

Communicators should pay close attention to U.S. compliance with the law in the coming months, diplomats reportedly worked behind the scenes to water down the legislation.

“European Union negotiators fear giving in to U.S. demands would fundamentally weaken the initiative,” reported Politico.

“For the treaty to have an effect worldwide, countries ‘have to accept that other countries have different standards and we have to agree on a common shared baseline — not just European but global,’” said  Thomas Schneider, the Swiss chairman of the committee.

If this global regulation dance sounds familiar, that’s because something similar happened when the EU adopted the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2016, an unprecedented consumer privacy law that required cooperation from any company operating in a European market. That law influenced the creation of the California Consumer Privacy Act two years later. 

As we saw last week when the SEC approved new rules for emissions reporting, the U.S. can water down regulations below a global standard. It doesn’t mean, however, that communicators with global stakeholders aren’t beholden to global laws.

Expect more developments on this landmark regulation in the coming weeks.

As news of regulation dominates, we are reminded that risk still abounds. While AI chip manufacturer NVIDIA rides all-time market highs and earned coverage for its competitive employer brand, the company also finds itself in the crosshairs of a proposed class action copyright infringement lawsuit just like OpenAI did nearly a year ago. 

Authors Brian Keene, Abdi Nazemian and Steward O’Nan allege that their works were part of a datasite NVIDIA used to train its NeMo AI platform. 

QZ reports:

Part of the collection of works NeMo was trained on included a dataset of books from Bibliotik, a so-called “shadow library” that hosts and distributes unlicensed copyrighted material. That dataset was available until October 2023, when it was listed as defunct and “no longer accessible due to reported copyright infringement.”

The authors claim that the takedown is essentially Nvidia’s concession that it trained its NeMo models on the dataset, thereby infringing on their copyrights. They are seeking unspecified damages for people in the U.S. whose copyrighted works have been used to train Nemo’s large language models within the past three years.

“We respect the rights of all content creators and believe we created NeMo in full compliance with copyright law,” a Nvidia spokesperson said.

While this lawsuit is a timely reminder that course corrections can be framed as an admission of guilt in the larger public narrative,  the stakes are even higher.

A new report from Gladstone AI, commissioned by the State Department, consulted experts at several AI labs including OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Meta offers substantial recommendations for the national security risks posed by the technology. Chief among its concerns is what’s characterized as a “lax approach to safety” in the interest of not slowing down progress,  cybersecurity concerns and more.

Time reports:

The finished document, titled “An Action Plan to Increase the Safety and Security of Advanced AI,” recommends a set of sweeping and unprecedented policy actions that, if enacted, would radically disrupt the AI industry. Congress should make it illegal, the report recommends, to train AI models using more than a certain level of computing power. The threshold, the report recommends, should be set by a new federal AI agency, although the report suggests, as an example, that the agency could set it just above the levels of computing power used to train current cutting-edge models like OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google’s Gemini. The new AI agency should require AI companies on the “frontier” of the industry to obtain government permission to train and deploy new models above a certain lower threshold, the report adds. Authorities should also “urgently” consider outlawing the publication of the “weights,” or inner workings, of powerful AI models, for example under open-source licenses, with violations possibly punishable by jail time, the report says. And the government should further tighten controls on the manufacture and export of AI chips, and channel federal funding toward “alignment” research that seeks to make advanced AI safer, it recommends.

On the ground level, Microsoft stepped up in blocking terms that generated violent, sexual imagery using Copilot after an engineer expressed their concerns to the FTC.

According to CNBC:

Prompts such as “pro choice,” “pro choce” [sic] and “four twenty,” which were each mentioned in CNBC’s investigation Wednesday, are now blocked, as well as the term “pro life.” There is also a warning about multiple policy violations leading to suspension from the tool, which CNBC had not encountered before Friday.

“This prompt has been blocked,” the Copilot warning alert states. “Our system automatically flagged this prompt because it may conflict with our content policy. More policy violations may lead to automatic suspension of your access. If you think this is a mistake, please report it to help us improve.”

This development is a reminder that AI platforms will increasingly put the onus on end users to follow evolving guidelines when we publish automated content. Whether you work within the capabilities of consumer-optimized GenAI tools or run your own, custom GPT, sweeping regulations to the AI industry are not a question of “if” but “when”.

Tools and use cases 

Walmart is seeking to cash in on the AI craze with pretty decent results, CNBC reports. Its current experiments surround becoming a one-stop destination for event planning. Rather than going to Walmart.com and typing in “paper cups,” “paper plates,” “fruit platter” and so on, the AI will generate a full list based on your needs – and of course, allow you to purchase it from Walmart. Some experts say this could be a threat to Google’s dominance, while others won’t go quite that far, but are still optimistic about its potential. Either way, it’s something for other retailers to watch.

Apple has been lagging other major tech players in the AI space. Its current biggest project is a laptop that touts its power for other AI applications, rather than developing its own. But FastCompany says that could change this summer when Apple rolls out its next operating systems, which are all but certain to include their own AI. 

FastCompany speculates that a project internally dubbed “AppleGPT” could revolutionize how voice assistant Siri works. It also may include an AI that lives on your device rather than in the cloud, which would be a major departure from other services. They’ll certainly make a splash if they can pull it off.

Meanwhile, Google’s Gemini rollout has been anything but smooth. Recently the company restricted queries related to upcoming global elections, The Guardian reported. 

A statement from Google’s India team reads: “Out of an abundance of caution on such an important topic, we have begun to roll out restrictions on the types of election-related queries for which Gemini will return responses.” The Guardian says that even basic questions like “Who is Donald Trump?” or asking about when to vote give answers that point users back to Google searches. It’s another black eye for the Gemini rollout, which consistently mishandles controversial questions or simply sends people back to familiar, safe technology.

But then, venturing into the unknown has big risks. Nature reports that AI is already being used in a variety of research applications, including generating images to illustrate scientific papers. The problems arise when close oversight isn’t applied, as in the case of a truly bizarre image of rat genitalia with garbled, nonsense text overlaid on it. Worst of all, this was peer reviewed and published. It’s yet another reminder that these tools cannot be trusted on their own. They need close oversight to avoid big embarrassment. 

AI is also threatening another field, completely divorced from scientific research: YouTube creators. Business Insider notes that there is an exodus of YouTubers from the platform this year. Their reasons are varied: Some face backlash, some are seeing declining views and others are focusing on other areas, like stand-up comedy. But Business Insider says that AI-generated content swamping the video platform is at least partly to blame:

Experts believe if the trend continues, it may usher in a future where relatable and authentic friends people used to turn to the platform to watch are fewer and far between. Instead, replaced by a mixture of exceedingly high-end videos only the MrBeasts of the internet can reach and sub-par AI junk thrown together by bots and designed to meet our consumption habits with the least effort possible.

That sounds like a bleak future indeed – and one that can also change the available influencers available to partner on the platform.

But we are beginning to see some backlash against AI use, especially in creative fields. At SXSW, two filmmakers behind “Everything Everywhere All at Once” decried the technology. Daniel Scheinert warned against AI, saying: “And if someone tells you, there’s no side effect. (AI’s) totally great, ‘get on board’ — I just want to go on the record and say that’s terrifying bullshit. That’s not true. And we should be talking really deeply about how to carefully, carefully deploy this stuff.”

Thinking carefully about responsible AI use is something we can all get behind. 

AI at work

As the aforementioned tools promise new innovations that will shape the future of work, businesses continue to adjust their strategies in kind.

Thompson-Reuters CEO Steve Hasker told the Financial Times that the company has “tremendous financial firepower” to expand the business into AI-driven professional services and information ahead of selling the remainder of its holding to the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG).

“We have dry powder of around $8 billion as a result of the cash-generative ability of our existing business, a very lightly levered balance sheet and the sell down of [our stake in] LSEG,” said Hasker. 

Thompson-Reuters has been on a two-year reorg journey to shift its services as a content provider into a “content-driven” tech company. It’s a timely reminder that now is the time to consider how AI fits not only into your internal use cases, but your business model. Testing tech and custom GPTs as “customer zero” internally can train your workforce and prepare a potentially exciting new product for market in one fell swoop. 

A recent WSJ feature goes into the cost-saving implications of using GenAI to integrate new corporate software systems, highlighting concerns that the contractors hired to implement these systems will see bottom-line savings through automation while charging companies the same rate. 

WSJ reports:

How generative AI efficiencies will affect pricing will continue to be hotly debated, said Bret Greenstein, data and AI leader at consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. It could increase the cost, since projects done with AI are higher quality and faster to deliver. Or it could lead to lower costs as AI-enabled integrators compete to offer customers a better price.

Jim Fowler, chief technology officer at insurance and financial services company Nationwide, said the company is leaning on its own developers, who are now using GitHub Copilot, for more specialized tasks. The company’s contractor count is down 20% since mid-2023, in part because its own developers can now be more productive. Fowler said he is also finding that contractors are now more willing to negotiate on price.

Remember, profits and productivity are not necessarily one in the same. Fresh Axios research found workers in Western countries are embracing AI’s potential for productivity less than others – only 17 % of U.S. respondents and 20% of EU said that AI improved productivity. That’s a huge gap from the countries reporting higher productivity, including 67% of Indian respondents, 65% in Indonesia and 62% in the UAE.

Keeping up and staying productive will also require staying competitive in the global marketplace. No wonder the war for AI talent rages on in Europe.

“Riding the investment wave, a crop of foreign AI firms – including Canada’s Cohere and U.S.-based Anthropic and OpenAI – opened offices in Europe last year, adding to pressure on tech companies already trying to attract and retain talent in the region,” Reuters reported. 

AI is also creating new job opportunities. Adweek says that marketing roles involving AI are exploding, from the C-suite on down. Among other new uses:

Gen AI entails a new layer of complexity for brands, prompting people within both brands and agencies to grasp the benefits of technology, such as Sora, while assessing its risks and ethical implications.

Navigating this balance could give rise to various new roles within the next year, including ethicists, conversational marketing specialists with expertise in sophisticated chatbots, and data-informed strategists on the brand side, according to Jason Snyder, CTO of IPG agency Momentum Worldwide.

Additionally, Snyder anticipates the emergence of an agency integration specialist role within brands at the corporate level.

“If you’re running a big brand marketing program, you need someone who’s responsible for integrating AI into all aspects of the marketing program,” said Snyder. “[Now] I see this role in in bits and pieces all over the place. [Eventually], whoever owns the budget for the work that’s being done will be closely aligned with that agency integration specialist.”

As companies like DeepMind offer incentives such as restricted stock, domestic startups will continue to struggle with hiring top talent if their AI tech stack isn’t up to the standard of big players like NVIDIA.

“People don’t want to leave because when you don’t have anything when they have peers to work with, and when they already have a great experimentation stack and existing models to bootstrap from, for somebody to leave, it’s a lot of work,” Aravind Srinivas, the founder and CEO of Perplexity, told Business Insider, 

“You have to offer such amazing incentives and immediate availability of compute. And we’re not talking of small compute clusters here.”

Another reminder that building a competitive, attractive employer brand around your organization’s AI integrations should be on every communicator’s mind. 

What trends and news are you tracking in the AI space? What would you like to see covered in our biweekly AI roundups, which are 100% written by humans? Let us know in the comments!

Allison Carter is editor-in-chief of PR Daily. Follow her on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Justin Joffe is the editorial director and editor-in-chief at Ragan Communications. Before joining Ragan, Joffe worked as a freelance journalist and communications writer specializing in the arts and culture, media and technology, PR and ad tech beats. His writing has appeared in several publications including Vulture, Newsweek, Vice, Relix, Flaunt, and many more.

The post AI for communicators: What’s new and what matters appeared first on PR Daily.

At their worst, speeches can be cold recitations of facts and figures that no one will remember past the moment they’re spoken.

At their best, they can be soaring oration that change hearts, stick in minds and impact the world.

Which they are depends in some measure on the person delivering it. But even the best orator on the planet can’t turn a dry speech into a masterpiece. Good speeches begin at the writing table, but the very best speeches begin with a story.

During Ragan’s recent Public Affairs & Speechwriting Virtual Conference, Michael Ricci, former speechwriter and director of communications for House Speakers John Boehner and Paul Ryan, and Nick Lanyi, media relations and crisis communications expert for RCG, explored how to use speechwriting to project optimism and stability in even the most difficult times. The keys are in emotion, empathy and storytelling.

“Just the insecurity, the stress of everything going on in the world requires some empathy,,” Lanyi said. “But it can’t be faked, it’s got to be there. Sometimes words alone will be helpful, but you want to encourage your principal to be able to convey that.”

Why storytelling matters

Speechwriting, Lanyi notes, is a unique form of communication. People can’t follow along with what you’re saying in real-time. They can’t rewind or re-read. They have to be in the moment.

“If all you’re talking about is abstract concepts or lists or descriptions unrelated to anything human, people are going to lose interest,” Lanyi said. “Whereas if you have a story that is about people struggling to try to achieve something important and the ups and downs they go through, people’s brains actually literally get turned on. They’re emotionally connected and they’re much more likely to hear what you have to say.”

These stories can follow a very simple arc, not so dissimilar from the classic Hero’s Journey:

• Find stories involving human beings (occasionally cute animals!) that speakers can use to demonstrate what they’re talking about. It gives the audience someone to root for.
• Show what that person wants to accomplish.
• Show what stands in their way.
• Show what happens – the good and the bad.

Not everything is a story, but it can make an argument come alive.

“Almost every practiced politician is going to talk about healthcare or the economy and then very quickly talk about real people doing stuff,” Lanyi said.

Indeed, finding a humanizing figure is such a hallowed part of politics, it even has its own name: Lenny Skutnik. Read more about the real Skutnik and the speechwriting trope.

The importance of a villain

Of course, all great stories need a villain. At a minimum, this is an obstacle that the person in the story must overcome to triumph: an industry, your competition, broader economic trends. But Ricci found that personifying that villain has greater impacts.

When he worked for then-Speaker of the House John Boehner, the natural villain was his Democratic counterpart, Senate Leader Harry Reid. But for a long time, Boehner wanted to maintain good relations with Reid and avoided naming him in speeches. Instead, the villain was the nebulous “the senate.”

But once the speechwriting team was given the greenlight to make Reid a proper villain, the messages hit more directly. The response was stronger on social media. [Any specific figures to back this up?-MK]

“When people see the good and the evil in your story, it has more impact,” Ricci said.

Ultimately, facts rarely change people’s mind. Emotions do. Building speeches around humans is the surest way to get people to remember and act.

Watch the full presentation below.

The post How and why to craft speeches based around emotion appeared first on PR Daily.

What started as a family photo shared to commemorate Mother’s Day has become a controversy that fans the flames of what many see as a larger Royal mystery.

Kensington Palace, the entity that handles the press for the Prince and Princess of Wales, shared an innocuous seeming photo with wire services Sunday. In it, Princess Catherine is seen smiling with her three children. It was also shared on Instagram with a caption marking Mother’s Day, which was observed Sunday in the U.K.

But hours later, news outlets including the Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse sent advisories urging news outlets to remove the photos, as they appeared to have been doctored.

“At closer inspection, it appears that the source has manipulated the image. No replacement image will be sent,” the AP wrote in its “kill notification, the New York Times reported, including a note to “Please remove it from all platforms, including social, where it may still be visible.”

Multiple photo agencies, including Reuters and AP, have pulled a new image of Kate Middleton from circulation over concerns that it has been “manipulated”https://t.co/rugFlBYHuI pic.twitter.com/rLfiWj7VJ7

— philip lewis (@Phil_Lewis_) March 10, 2024

Specifically, Princess Charlotte’s hand appeared to have been moved, among other minor inconsistencies. While minor editing, such as cropping and photo correction, is generally allowed in wire service photos, this was a bridge too far.

The kill notification set social media aflame. Middleton has been largely out of the public eye since she had abdominal surgery in January. The photo, intended to show Catherine well and happy, was now a source of mystery.

Hours later, the princess posted an apology on X. “Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing. I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion the family photograph we shared yesterday caused.” The post is signed with “C,” which signifies that the message was authored by the princess herself.

Why it matters: Anything the royal family does will be intensely scrutinized, both in the U.K. and around the world. A miscommunication occurred between the family and their press office around what standards are acceptable for Instagram versus what will fly with international wire services. At a time when Princess Catherine has been kept out of the public eye, with wild speculation swirling, it all adds to a public relations fire. The palace’s failure to properly vet the photo, along with its slow response, allowed those flames to grow even higher.

Was this an innocent mistake from a frazzled mum recovering from surgery and trying to make her family look their best? An intentional move to conceal or hide something from the public? We don’t know, but everyone will speculate.

Let this be a reminder to work closely with your principals and clients on what standards work for the press and what’s OK for social media. If they submit a photograph, ensure you’re asking questions about who took it, how it was altered and if there’s anything else you need to know.

Editor’s Top Picks:

• It was another bad week for Boeing, with a bevy of incidents once again pulling the aircraft manufacturer’s name into controversy. Al Jazeera lists a number of problems with Boeing craft over the last week, including a “technical event” on a flight from Australia to New Zealand that led to a “strong movement” and resulted in dozens of injuries; an emergency landing necessitated after an engine sucked in bubble wrap; another emergency landing due to fumes in the cabin; and a tire falling off a plane in San Francisco, destroying a car. Some of these incidents are unlikely to be caused by any fault of Boeing’s, but it all contributes to a larger narrative of Boeing planes having problems. It undermines confidence and perpetuates a damaging narrative at a time when Boeing is looking to move forward.
• The breakout moment of last night’s Oscars ceremony was a rockstar-caliber performance of “I’m Just Ken” from “Barbie.” Dressed in a pink, sparkling suit, Ryan Gosling delivered a splashy performance that included his fellow Kens from the film, guitarist Slash and “Barbie” director Greta Gerwig and star Margot Robbie. While “Barbie” was mostly shut out of the awards (it took home Best Original Song, not for “I’m Just Ken” but for the ballad “What Was I Made For?”), this performance ensured the film will stay a hot topic of conversation, likely even equaling winning darling “Oppenheimer.” It’s a show of what can happen when you stay true to yourself, your vision and a sense of overwhelming fun.
• The hottest new accessory is a $2.99 canvas bag from Trade Joe’s. CNN reports that the branded totes are being sold on Ebay for hundreds of dollars, though it’s unclear if anyone is buying them at that rate. Still, there’s no question that shoppers are clamoring for the simple gear, drawing comparisons to the Stanley cup in the intensity of its hype. There’s no bigger marketing win than when customers wear your name with pride. Is there an opportunity in your organization for your own branded swag moment?

Allison Carter is editor-in-chief of PR Daily. Follow her on X or LinkedIn.

The post The Scoop: Princess Catherine apologizes after doctored photo is removed from wire services appeared first on PR Daily.

Tom Corfman is one of the customers looking forward to a $5 credit. He’s a senior consultant with RCG.

Any letter that promptly gives a refund to thousands of customers is a good letter, but some letters are better than others.

AT&T CEO John Stankey’s refund announcement on Feb. 25, 2024, just three days after a massive outage, was a masterful response to an intense, if short-lived, corporate crisis.

The prompt action was widely covered by the news media, shifting the coverage from customers’ troubles to the company’s action.

While his “letter to employees” got the job done, the writing didn’t match the brilliance of the strategy. We have five questions and edits that would have made the letter more effective. But first a little background.

No service
Stankey knows the phone business. The Pasadena, Calif. native in 1985 took a job out of college with Pacific Bell, which eventually became part of AT&T. He worked his way up, becoming CEO in 2020.

The outage began in the early hours of Feb. 22, with service restored by noon. The company hasn’t disclosed how many of its 90 million cellphone subscribers were affected, but Downdetector, which monitors disruptions, counted more than 1.5 million reports of problems.

Whatever the total amount of the refund, the comms giant says it won’t significantly affect its financial performance. Revenue was $122.42 billion last year.

The letter has some pretty good lines, such as this one, “This is not our first network outage, and it won’t be our last—unfortunately, it’s the reality of our business.”

Here are the edits and questions we would have proposed if we had been Stankey’s editor:

1. Who’s the audience? While called a “letter to employees,” much of it was meant for customers and the broader audience, and not just the refund offer. Writing internal memos with an eye toward external audiences is a sound practice considering how quickly things are spread on social media. But you must decide which audience is the primary target.

For example, if the primary audience is employees, they aren’t addressed until the seventh paragraph, which is well-written and begins, “Whenever a challenging or unexpected event impacts this company, I can always count on everyone to rise to the occasion and the last few days have been no exception.” Let’s move that up.

If the focus is customers, mention the refund earlier than the fifth graph, as journalists call them, and add three words to Stankey’s first sentence, “Thursday was a challenging day for our customers and our company.”

2. We screwed up. His second sentence is straightforward: “Our purpose is to connect people to greater possibility, and we fell short of what we typically do so well each and every day.”

His apology is clear but doesn’t come until the fourth graph, after a 129-word description of the cause and length of the interruption.

“No matter the timing, one thing is clear—we let down many of our customers, including many of you and your families. For that, we apologize,” he says.

The background is important but shouldn’t get in the way of the primary message.

3. How much? The amount of the refund was of keen interest to customers and the news media, but the company made everyone hunt for it.

Stankey never put a dollar amount on the refund, saying only it would be credit “for essentially a full day of service.” The amount is on a separate web page entitled, “Making it right,” which isn’t linked in Stankey’s letter or the news release posting the letter.

On that page, a footnote reads:

Credit does not apply to AT&T Business Enterprise and Platinum accounts, AT&T Prepaid or Cricket.

One $5 credit per account on your AT&T WirelessSM account.

Bill credits will typically be applied within 2 bill cycles.

Is this why they say you need to read the fine print on cellphone contracts?

4. Jargon jungle. Stankey’s had several high-level tech positions, which may explain his explanation for what happened: “the application and execution of an incorrect process used while working to expand our network.”

In plain English, please? A “software update went wrong,” according to ABC News.

Then there are these sentences:

We all know that our customers receive tremendous value and convenience for the nominal daily cost of our service, and outages sometimes have outsized impacts on some subscribers that may be greater than the face value of the credit. For that reason, I believe that crediting those customers for essentially a full day of service is the right thing to do.

I think he’s trying to say: Crediting our customers for a full day of service is the right thing to do, even though the service wasn’t down for an entire day. I recognize that the cost of the outage on some customers may have exceeded a full day’s credit.

Of course, no corporate communication is complete with an “implemented,” and Stankey works it into the next to last paragraph.

5. Tighten up. The letter tips the scale at 686 words, taking up a printed page and a half. Much of the letter reads like it was hijacked by the marketing department, detracting from the important message. It could be trimmed to 500 words by simply eliminating the fluff.

Every day
Stankey has had bigger headaches than this outage. Before he became CEO, he played a key role in ATT’s 2018 acquisition of media giant Time Warner for $109 billion.

Time Warner flailed about under its new parent. Stankey, promoted to CEO in 2020, gave up on the acquisition. In 2022, he merged the renamed WarnerMedia unit with Discovery, resulting in a $47 billion loss to AT&T shareholders, according to The New York Times. The company disputed the newspaper’s calculation, saying the transaction benefited shareholders.

In an interview on CNBC in September, Stankey was asked when the stock market would recognize the value of his business strategy.

“I’m accountable every day,” he responded.

Some days more than others.

Follow RCG on LinkedIn .

The post AT&T CEO John Stankey’s refund letter was a masterclass in corporate crisis. Here’s why. appeared first on PR Daily.

Heather Kernahan serves as the Global CEO of Hotwire, a leading global technology communications and marketing consultancy, collaborating closely with some of the most prominent tech companies globally. 

At Hotwire, she spearheads the Ignite Possibility Program, allocating up to $1 million USD in pro bono brand marketing and public relations services to tech and tech-enabled organizations supporting underserved communities. Additionally, Kernahan actively participates as an LP with Portfolia and How Women Invest, focusing on investments in women-driven tech companies.

With a background spanning over 25 years in the tech industry, Kernahan has leveraged her insights to craft the UNSTUCK model, a central framework in her book, “UNSTUCKABLE,” offering guidance for avoiding business stagnation. Kernahan is scheduled to speak about her book at SXSW on March 10. 

According to Kernahan, the opportune moment for thinking big, taking bold actions, and persevering is always now.

My first comms profession was:

Twenty-five years ago, I started in the tech industry by accident. I was working as an alumni coordinator at a university when I stumbled onto a job description for a marketing and communications coordinator at a web development company called Caught in the Web. There was a lot of excitement about the Internet, how it was developing and the possibilities, so I went for the job, moving thousands of miles away from home to take the role. After a year, I knew I would be in tech for life. Every day was different and there was so much energy and excitement because we were part of a community building the new and next tech innovations.

The moment I’m proudest of in my entire career is when I:

I feel proudest when I’m able to connect with others and motivate them to tap into their greatest potential whatever that may be.

My mother consistently instilled in me the belief that I could pursue any aspiration and I still hear her in my mind each day saying, “Heather, you can do anything you set your mind to, you’re a strong, capable woman!” Recognizing that not everyone receives such encouragement, one of my goals at Hotwire is for our team to feel that anything is possible for them. If they have a clear goal, we can help get them there.

The thing I’m most excited about for the future of my profession is:

One of the things I’m most excited about for the future of my profession is the opportunity to welcome more diverse voices and talent into the communications and marketing industry.

One way we’ve done that at Hotwire is by launching Into Tech, a free, on-demand skill-building course for marketing and communications professionals who may want to work in the tech sector.  Into Tech is about breaking down the perceived barriers to working in tech so we can broaden and diversify tech marketing and communications. We don’t just need more talent, we need a more diverse workforce that brings in a diversity of thinking, approaches and ideas. 

One thing that worries me about the future of my profession is:

The state of mental health in all generations is one thing that worries me. The Center for Workplace Mental Health studies mental health at work and since Covid, rates of anxiety and depression have increased substantially. There is increased involvement from governments around the world on the topic with Australia recently passing the Right to Disconnect bill and similar laws already in France, Spain and other countries in the EU.

The openness to talk about mental health is improving in our industry and benefit changes are providing more support for everyone to get the help they need. Leaders can continue to keep the topic on their agenda as we move through this time of change for how business and people work together.

A tool or a piece of software I cannot live without is:

Broadly, I cannot live without social media platforms, and I use many of them for different reasons. Discord, LinkedIn, Meta, Instagram, Threads and yes, X is still in use as a place for news.

The most underrated skill in my profession is:

The leadership practice of staying loose is not valued enough. This entails consciously managing stress and tension, allowing oneself to remain agile and open-minded even in the face of adversity. This skill is not just about remaining physically relaxed but also about cultivating mental resilience and emotional balance. Leaders who have this skill inspire confidence and trust in their teams, building a culture of resilience and adaptability. They demonstrate that maintaining composure and flexibility in challenging situations is not only possible but also essential for success.

Isis Simpson-Mersha is a conference producer/ reporter for Ragan. Follow her on LinkedIn.

The post How I Got Here: Hotwire’s Heather Kernahan on mastering underrated leadership skills appeared first on PR Daily.

You’ve probably heard lectures against the passive voice since you were in grade school. It’s practically the boogieman of grammar: always lurking, ready to creep into your writing the moment you let your attention wander.

But why is the passive voice such a problem? Why do we combat it with such fervor? And what are the pitfalls of using it in communications and business writing?

Passive voice vs. active voice

Think about a passive person. They just sit there and things happen to them. A gift is given to them. A show is watched by them. They do not act; life acts upon them.

Now think of an active person. They do things! They give gifts. They write books. They are the subject and the hero of their own story.

That’s the difference between active and passive voice writing in a nutshell.

In active voice, the subject of the sentence is taking an action. The noun does the verb, in grammatical terms. The hero defeats the villain – that’s active voice.

In passive voice, the order is flipped. The villain is defeated by the hero is passive voice. The subject of the sentence here, the villain, is being acted upon by the hero. He isn’t acting himself. He is a recipient of the action. Usually, you can spot passive voice construction through its use of the verb “to be” and its various irregularly conjugated forms – is, are, were, was, etc.

Who cares?

This might all sound like grammatical nerdery. Subjects and predicates are things you left behind when you passed the SAT. But even if you aren’t paying attention to the terminology, the application still matters in day-to-day communications work.

First, passive voice just uses more words. When you’re writing social copy, a speech or something for a digital signage board, every word counts. Why waste them on words as boring as “to be”? You’re not Hamlet.

Second, the passive voice requires us to unspool a sentence in our minds. Wait, what happened to whom? English is set up to generally default to subjects acting upon other objects, rather than writing the sentences in reverse. You’re introducing more steps between reading and comprehension, and in an industry where you’re constantly fighting for attention, why would you want to do that?

But in some contexts, the passive voice can do more than simply impede comprehension or rack up your word count. It can just get you into trouble.

The passive voice avoids responsibility

Flash back to being a child. Your parent comes home from work and finds a crime scene: a shattered vase.

“Do you know what happened to the vase?”

“It got broken,” innocent childhood you replies. Because even back then, you knew that passive voice was a way of getting out of taking responsibility for something that happened.

You didn’t break the vase playing football in the house. It merely was broken by the forces of the universe. No one to blame, really. The vase was broken. How sad.

Now take this out of your childhood home and into the boardroom.

“Layoffs are being carried out,” your CEO tells your staff in an all-hands meeting. Again, they are a force of nature, something unpredictable rather than an action taken by your organization.

“We have made the tough decision to layoff portions of our staff,” your CEO says instead. She is owning the difficult action, putting a human face and a sense of responsibility onto the layoffs. While the result is the same, people losing their jobs, those who remain will better understand who made the choice and who stands behind it.

Or apply it to your customers.

“A wheelchair was broken in transit,” your statement says after an influencer complained that their mobility aid was damaged.

Or it could read instead: “We made a mistake. Our team damaged a wheelchair. We’re instituting new training measure to ensure this doesn’t happen again.”

One phrasing takes responsibility. The other skirts it.

Now, obviously there are times when you can’t outright take ownership of a situation. Maybe it isn’t your fault. Maybe legal is telling you to keep it vague. The passive voice still has a place in your writing.

But whenever possible, stop and ask yourself: can this sentence be active? What would that mean, not just for the quality of my writing, but for the people reading it?

You might be surprised at the difference.

Allison Carter is editor-in-chief of PR Daily. Follow her on X or LinkedIn.

The post How the passive voice can get you into trouble appeared first on PR Daily.

Microsoft is running at the head of the AI craze. From its partnership with OpenAI to its Copilot tool to Azure AI and more, the tech giant is putting out new tools by the day to help people and organizations take advantage of generative AI.

But how is Microsoft’s own communications team using AI in their day-to-day work?

We got a bit of insight during PR Daily’s recent Public Affairs & Speechwriting Virtual Conference, when Microsoft VP of Public Affairs Brent Colburn revealed several ways his own department is using AI, from measurement to media relations.

Using AI for measurement

“Traditionally, we’re really good at hindsight in communications,” Colburn noted in his presentation, calling this kind of measurement “hindsight.” And AI can make that hindsight part of measurement even faster and more effective. AI can quickly generate clip reports that don’t merely show you all media you’ve generated, but more personalized reports that show all pieces from a trade journal, for instance, or from a specific geographic location.

Colburn also sees a great opportunity for what he calls insight: real-time information that can help us respond in the moment.

“As news is spooling out, how can we be looking at clips, how can we be looking at news articles that come online, in a more thoughtful and nuanced way?” Colburn mused. He noted that competitive or comparative analysis is also a strength of AI. For instance, AI can help see how coverage of Microsoft stacks up against coverage of Google on a certain topic or even compare coverage of five different Congresspeople. That kind of analysis, if delivered by a human, could take hours, while an AI can deliver it all but instantly.

But what Colburn considers most exciting is foresight, which allows us to use AI to peer into the future and “make better decisions.”

“They don’t just become a record of what’s occurred, but a little bit of a guidepost for where you might want to go,” Colburn said.

For instance, foresight can help us:

• Identify reporters to pitch to based on their past coverage.
• Help identify what else reporters you’ve worked with in the past might be interested in covering next.
• Identify issues or problems with published stories for faster correction.
• Analyze who’s really reading stories and better understand audiences.

Using AI for earned media

In addition to using AI for measurement tasks, Microsoft has also mapped its entire earned media process, from story pitch to publication, and identified several areas where AI can automate or act as a copilot.

Automative opportunities include creating reports or advisories, what Colburn refers to as “drudgery” tasks. But AI acting as a copilot — echoing the name of Microsoft’s flagship AI product — also offers opportunities to advise humans without taking over the whole show.

Suggestions for using AI in the media relations cycle include:

• Giving AI your best story ideas and asking for what you’re missing.
• Giving AI your initial talking points and asking it to add its own.
• Showing AI the reporters you’re going to pitch to and asking who else you should consider.
• Asking AI to review a reporter’s past work to identify the kinds of questions they’re likely to ask in an interview.

All of these tactics not only save time, but in Colburn’s words, they help you “think around the corner a little bit” and put out your best work — with a little extra help.

Watch Colburn’s full presentation.

The post How Microsoft is using AI for measurement for its own comms appeared first on PR Daily.

The most challenging part of layoff communications, beyond the human and emotional toll, is controlling the narrative: telling the right story to employees who are leaving, to those who are staying, to shareholders and investors, to the general public.

But increasingly, other parties – often those who have been laid off – are sharing their side of the story.  When unaddressed, these incidents can cause serious harm to employee morale, employer branding and general market sentiment.

Whether former employees are leaking layoff communications to the press, recording their own terminations, sharing stories on social media or banding together and responding as a union, these actions can create new wrinkles. Navigating these situations requires a strong partnership between both internal and external communicators before, during and after layoffs to mitigate damage and respond with empathy.

Here are some common scenarios that can occur when individual workers begin to become the story in the wake of a layoff, plus how to respond – or even prevent these scenarios entirely.

Leaks 

Leaks are the most familiar of these challenges to many communicators. It’s as simple as a current or former employee hitting “forward” on an email message, screenshotting an intranet post, or recording a town hall and passing it along to a sympathetic reporter.

In a matter of moments, every word you so carefully workshopped with leadership can now be dissected or taken out of context.

But in many cases, this isn’t a disaster. Journalists who get their hands on these memos often use them to inform their reporting on the layoffs, using simple excerpts to illustrate the whys and hows for their audiences, as in this Wall Street Journal piece on layoffs.

A well-crafted layoff memo or email is worth “leaking” yourself. Whether that means proactively sending it to a trusted reporter or posting it on your website, as eBay did here, these communications can help tell your story clearly. If it helps your employees understand better, chances are it’ll help all audiences do so.

The issue arises when the leaked communications aren’t put together well. When they don’t respect the inherent humanity of the people losing their jobs. When they make the CEO holding the ax seem like a victim.

We’ve seen this happen time and time again. In 2023, the CEO of PagerDuty quoted Martin Luther King on the measure of a good leader in the same email where she announced a 7% reduction in force. In 2021, a video of the CEO of Better.com laying off 900 employees via Zoom and once again making himself the main character (“This is the second time in my career I’m doing this and I do not want to do this. The last time I did it, I cried,” CEO Vishal Garg said on the call).

The bottom line: Craft all layoff communications, including speeches, with the expectation that they will leak. If you wouldn’t feel good about the announcement memo appearing on the front page of the New York Times, don’t send it to your staff. Consider crafting the documents in such a way that they can serve external audiences as well as internal stakeholders. Bring together your internal and external teams to explain the situation with compassion – but also a keen understanding of the business and its implications. If you share your communications first, you’ll have the opportunity to frame them in the best possible light.

People sharing personal stories 

A Wayfair employee was about to head to a chemotherapy appointment to treat her stage 4 metastatic breast cancer when she got word that she had been laid off. She was on medical leave at the time but was terminated all the same, as she detailed in a LinkedIn post.

(Yes, it is legal to lay someone off while on leave, whether medical or parental, as long as the leave is not the reason they are laid off.)

That would have been a personal tragedy, but a series of communications missteps compounded the fear, stress and anxiety that a person undergoing chemotherapy had to endure, including long pauses before additional information was shared on the severance package and other details.

“To say this raised my anxiety would be an understatement,” Andrena M. wrote on LinkedIn. “I kid you not my blood pressure which is always normal, despite stage 4, was the highest I can recall and my resting heart rate the highest on record.”

Wayfair, of course, had its share of bad press for how it handled employee communications in general and layoffs in particular, as our colleague Sean Devlin explains on Ragan.com.

The bottom line: There is no way to make a layoff stress-free, but this level of waiting and anxiety is unnecessary. Establish the cadence of how information will be rolled out to terminated employees so that it comes quickly, answering questions proactively without leaving them wondering. Mistakes can happen and delays might occur, but do your best to get information into their hands as quickly as you can so they can go about their lives and plan their next moves.

And – this is a larger conversation to be had in conjunction with HR – consider whether it’s possible to let people finish their leave before they are officially terminated.

As NPR notes, “Still, some employers do wait until the end of someone’s leave to implement a layoff. In some cases, they want to give that person extra time to get back on their feet. Other times, it’s to avoid any chance of a costly legal fight.”

For more information on how to access the full story and become a member of Ragan’s Communications Leadership Council, reach out here.

Allison Carter is editor-in-chief of PR Daily. Follow her on Twitter or LinkedIn.

The post 3 ways to prevent ex-employees from seizing control of your layoff narrative appeared first on PR Daily.

What began five years ago as a complaint from Spotify has ended in a €1.84 billion fine from the EU over antitrust violations, The Verge reported. The complaint centered around the App Store, which would not permit app developers from pointing customers to cheaper subscription deals that could be found outside the app.

“For a decade, Apple abused its dominant position in the market for the distribution of music streaming apps through the App Store,” said Margrethe Vestager, executive vice-president in charge of competition policy for the European Commission.

Spotify responded with a fiery, triumphant statement, The Verge reported: “Apple’s rules muzzled Spotify and other music streaming services from sharing with our users directly in our app about various benefits — denying us the ability to communicate with them about how to upgrade and the price of subscriptions, promotions, discounts, or numerous other perks. Of course, Apple Music, a competitor to these apps, is not barred from the same behaviour.”

But Apple itself was defiant, claiming that the Commission failed “to uncover any credible evidence of consumer harm, and ignores the realities of a market that is thriving, competitive, and growing fast.” Apple also credited its App Store for much of Spotify’s success in Europe, where it controls 56% of the streaming music market.

Why it matters: A new wave of regulation is about to hit Big Tech — hard. Much as it has when tackling online privacy, the EU is leading the way as eyes turn to the major player’s market share and competition practices. Apple is already being forced to change many aspects of its App Store to comply with the Union’s Digital Markets Act, though it’s still being criticized for taking a 17% cut even for app developers who link out to websites or other subscription processors, The Verge reported. U.S. courts ordered similar changes, though Apple is still clinging to a 27% commission, a modest discount from its usual 30%.

This moment points to the key importance of a strong public affairs game. Apple, and other tech giants seeing major regulatory pushes, must make the case for how they have innovated and helped build the modern tech ecosystem that has allowed companies like Spotify to thrive. At the same time, those upstart companies are now going to be pointing out their need to grow on an even field. If they face antitrust rulings and legislation, they will need to be ready to adapt and brace for the changes global regulators require — which has implications not only for consumers but also for employees who can face a potentially unstable future for their tech giant employers.

It’s a fascinating moment in tech history, and savvy PR and public affairs could help push the future in one direction or the other.

Editor’s Top Picks:

• The Washington Post’s tech columnist has dubbed two tax companies’ attempts at using AI to answer pressing questions about returns “awful.” Geoffery A. Fowler says the AI-powered chatbot provided by TurboTax and H&R Block ranges from simply unhelpful to flat-out wrong in ways that could impact a filer’s tax return. Worse still, when asked about the shoddy AI tools, H&R Block called the columnist’s questions “niche” (is cryptocurrency niche in the year 2024?) and blamed his questions for lacking “specificity and clarity.” People come to tax tools like these because they trust the answers they’re getting in a high-stakes endeavor. Incorrect information, whether from a person or an AI, undermines that trust, especially at a time when more free tax tools are coming onto the market. If AI can’t be relied upon, it shouldn’t be used.
• Walgreens and CVS are weeks away from beginning to dispense the abortion pill mifepristone in a number of blue states where abortion is still illegal, NBC News reported. There is already backlash from anti-abortion groups and the conservative media over the decision, and more is certain to come as the pills are dispensed. Last year, 20 Republican attorneys general cautioned the pharmacies against sending the pills via mail to their states. For now, the pills will only be available in physical locations in select states, but this controversy is certain to spill beyond those borders. The Supreme Court will also hear a case about abortion pills soon, which is likely to complicate the situation even further. CVS and Walgreens must walk a dangerous tightrope, with any move they make certain to draw ire from one group or another. Employee training and security measures are a must during this difficult time.
• Brands are increasingly creating their own reality TV shows in a bid to grab attention with innovative content, Business Insider reported. Ally Bank’s “Side Hustlers” pits six women fighting for business investments against one another, while H&R Block’s “Responsibility Island” spoofs dating shows by putting sexy singles on an island where they must … file their taxes, among other mundane tasks. Both series air on Roku. “Twenty- to 30-year-olds aren’t so interested in the documentary-style story of how H&R Block got started,” Rick Parkhill, director and cofounder of Brand Storytelling, told Business Insider. “Audiences are attracted by uplifting docs, but comedy works really well. And comedy is the most effective audience builder when it comes to advertising.” It’s all another tool in the content marketing toolbox.

Allison Carter is editor-in-chief of PR Daily. Follow her on Twitter or LinkedIn.

The post The Scoop: Spotify complaint leads to $2B EU fine for Apple appeared first on PR Daily.

OpenAI rocked the world again after announcing its new generative AI video tool, Sora. While it’s not yet available to the general public and currently reserved for a select few testers and filmmakers, the Washington Post got a chance to put Sora through its paces.

The results are a mixed bag that shows just how advanced this technology is – and how far it has to go.

Some artificially created videos perfectly fool the eye. When asked to produce a drone shot of the Big Sur coastline, Sora created a place that did not exist – but unless you’re intimately, deeply familiar with that area, you’d never know it. The sunshine is perfectly angled, the rocks are craggy, the waves roll in just as they should. It wouldn’t look out of place in a nature documentary.

But Sora struggled in other places. Most notably, it seems to have difficulty when objects must interact with each other. A request for a 1930s-style clip of a person lighting a cigarette comes off as a piece of absurdist art with a perfectly rendered vintage businessman summoning smoke out of thin air — not   to the two cigarettes in his hand, but one which has appeared in his mouth. In another shot, a believable man in workout gear runs on a treadmill. The only problem? He’s running the wrong way on the machine.

There are more subtle issues, too: In a Holi crowd scene, background revelers merge and morph into one another. And the Post even flagged a potential copyright issue.

Why it matters: “The model is definitely not yet perfect,” Tim Brooks, OpenAI research scientist and co-lead on Sora, told the Post.

The story and its examples provide a tantalizing look at the future – but one that’s not quite here yet. In addition to the visual hiccups, Sora can’t yet produce sound. At the moment – and it’s an early moment, to be clear – Sora’s best use seems to be providing B-roll or background footage that won’t be scrutinized too closely. As a focal point, the footage will quickly be pegged as AI-generated, which could lead to decreased trust among audiences.

There will come a day, likely soon, when these kinks will be ironed out. Then we’ll have hard choices to make about when we continue to pursue what’s real and when we take the easy way out and reach for the artificial.

Editor’s Top Picks:

• In other OpenAI news, Elon Musk sued the tech innovator and CEO Sam Altman for breaching its founding principles by “maximising profits” over benefiting humanity, the BBC reported. Musk was one of three co-founders of the non-profit corporation, though he left after just three years and now his xAI Grok is a rival to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Furthering this clash of the tech titans, Microsoft is a major backer of OpenAI and is all but certain to wind up pulled into the suit somehow. It’s a reminder of just how early in the development of this new class of technology we are and how messy and muddled things will get before the horizon clears.
• In the wake of a cringe-inducing New York Times Magazine interview with reality TV show Tom Sandoval of “Vanderpump Rules” fame in which he compared his affair to the murder of George Floyd and said he was more reviled than convicted rapist Danny Masterson, several publicists to the reality stars spoke about just how difficult it can be to corral these unpredictable clients. Some advice was conventional, such as heavily researching the outlet, prepping a client extensively and urging them to take a page from Aaron Burr and “talk less, smile more.” One, however, said she prefers her reality TV clients only interview with outlets who will allow her to be involved in editing the final product – a move which would sharply limit the number of outlets available.
• Oprah Winfrey is leaving the board of WW, formerly known as Weight Watchers, after nine years, NBC News reported. Winfrey has been public for decades about her struggles with her weight, and says she intends to remain an active part of the conversation. While both sides were cordial and positive about their past and future relationship, her departure sent the company’s stock cratering. Winfrey said she used new weight loss drugs as a maintenance tool – pharmaceuticals which also threaten WW’s more traditional weight loss model. Combined with the loss of Winfrey’s star power, it could be a very challenging season for WW.

Allison Carter is editor-in-chief of PR Daily. Follow her on Twitter or LinkedIn.

The post The Scoop: How OpenAI’s Sora video tool performs appeared first on PR Daily.

Principal and Co-Founder at Johnson & Roy, Joel Johnson collaborates with Fortune 50 automotive OEMs, governments and oversight bureaus, growth startups, and enthusiast and trade publications across the spectrum of tech and mobility.

 Beyond his role at this global consulting firm, he threads creativity as the visiting chief creative officer at the Missouri Star Quilt Company (MSQC). The quilt company has grown into one of the nation’s largest quilting and fabric retailers, boasting over 400 employees, a dozen retail stores in Hamilton, attracting 100,000 annual tourists, and nearly a million YouTube followers. 

The key to excellence in storytelling is:

An elder statesman of public relations once told me something very important, which I think probably says it best: “If you give your audience something they didn’t know they wanted, in a place they didn’t expect to find it—a bit of wisdom, a funny turn of phrase, a moment of inspiration—they’ll always read to the end of a paragraph even if you made up the story entirely.” He also told me I was smart and handsome, because reader? That elder statesman was me.

‘Storytelling’ is, like ‘imagine,’ a wonderful word creaking under the weight of corporate misuse. Storytelling is ancient, a critical tool of survival, vaguely magical, possibly hardwired into the operation of sapience itself. In the corporate milieu, it’s a word typically used by neophyte illusionists who haven’t had enough therapy to accept that selective eliding of the truth is intrinsic to the art.

The greatest story is that which requires no telling. An excellent story hides in plain sight, beckons but does not coax. It makes the reader feel as if they have become smarter of their own volition; if they share the story as their own you know you’ve done something right.

To tell a story that travels you must know your true audience and intuit the state in which they will find your message through empathy, statistics, or guile.

For example, my audience for this story, by dint of this venue, might be presumed to be professionals in the public relations industry, because they are the people who would read a Q&A with a public relations expert. There’s little direct benefit to me professionally to be known to public relations professionals reading a trade publication, so I can say virtually anything because my true audience is Google’s index spiders.

By participating in this Q&A (for which I am grateful, of course) my name is slightly elevated in Google’s ranking for a few terms that are peripherally related to things for which potential clients might search. Because I simply need to associate a few search terms with my name—things like ‘narrative strategy,’ ‘public relations strategy,’ ‘crisis strategy,’ ‘corporate brand strategy,’ ‘professional dyspepsia,’ etc.—I can even risk mangling a Sun Tzu quote and know that the robots will never intuit that I stole it.

The most rewarding part of my job is:

Meeting modest, clever, hard-working people who hope to make the world—or just their company—a better place but need a little help clarifying how they talk to their employees, investors, or customers. I learn much from them. They usually already know how to tell their story. They just need an editor.

The most difficult part of my job is:

Meeting people who are lying to themselves about what they hope to get out of brand and narrative strategy. There are few reasons people seek attention and almost all of them can be reduced down to the desire for fame, power, or money. People may even have good intentions in seeking fame, power, or money; I know I do. (It’s so that I can make enough money to stop working and putter in my workshop all day creating the world’s first USB-C butter warmer.)

But when a client has fooled themselves into denying their desires, it slows down the work. Unwinding these delusions is slow, painful, and, because of my own impatience (I’m working on it) often infuriating. I would rather help leaders who can say “I need to be more respected in my field so I can secure better capital terms” than those who maintain they are seeking attention because of a selfless, noble mandate to humanity.

The world’s a noisy place; speak clearly.

I stay on top of trends by:

I read newspapers. I read books and the occasional magazine. I read a lightly curated collection of sub-Reddits. I read Hacker News. I have a coterie of obnoxious(ly?) smart friends with varied interests who insert memes and trends into my brain via group chats despite repeated requests for them to leave me alone. I have hard-won good taste and, most importantly, know when to rely on the taste of others.

One way I maintain my work-life balance is:

I don’t. Work-Life balance is a myth in the United States. I do everything as quickly and thoroughly as I can until I periodically melt down. Then I try to learn from that meltdown and extend the interval between the inevitable next meltdown, through better planning or more rigorously applied discipline to exercise, sleep, or rest. There is no way for me to maintain the lifestyle I prefer, one where I engage in my interests and learn by falling down rabbit holes, going on trips, as well as have nice material things like a house and cars and motorcycles, without pushing my entropy-cursed body and mind to its ever-decreasing limit.

Don’t get me wrong: this is by choice. I could make different decisions. But life is so short and there is so much to do, so much to try, so much to learn. And I’m getting better at learning.

My professional motto/mantra is:

“Would you rather argue about it or would you rather test it?”

Isis Simpson-Mersha is a conference producer/ reporter for Ragan. Follow her on LinkedIn.

The post How I got here: Joel Johnson on the key to excellence in storytelling appeared first on PR Daily.

AI continues to shape our world in ways big and small. From misleading imagery to new attempts at regulation and big changes in how newsrooms use AI, there’s no shortage of big stories.

Here’s what communicators need to know. 

AI risks

One of the biggest concerns about generative AI is the possibility of building bias into machine learning systems that can influence output. It appears that Google may have overcorrected for this possibility with the image generation tools in its newly renamed AI tool Gemini.

The New York Times reported that Google temporarily suspended Gemini’s ability to generate images of people after the tool  returned a number of AI-generated images that fumbled the ball by over-indexing on including women and people of color, even when this led to historical misrepresentations or simply refusing to show white people.

Among the missteps, Gemini returned images of Asian women and Black men in Nazi uniforms when asked to show a German soldier in 1943, and refused to show images of white couples when asked. 

In a statement posted to X, Google’s Comms team wrote, “Gemini’s AI image generation does generate a wide range of people. And that’s generally a good thing because people around the world use it. But it’s missing the mark here.”

This issue highlights Google’s challenges to overcome the biases present on the broader internet, which fuels its AI generation tool, without going too far in the other direction. 

Finally, a reminder that what comes from generative AI is often made of pure imagination. 

Business Insider reports that families were enticed with beautiful, AI-generated fantasies of a candy-filled extravaganza that nodded to Willy Wonka. But families in Scotland forked over the equivalent of $44 for a barren warehouse with a few banners taped to the walls, photos revealed.

Police were called to an ‘immersive’ Willy Wonka Experience after families showed up to an ’empty warehouse’

The event reportedly charged $40 for entry, advertised with AI art, and said it would be a ‘journey filled with wondrous creations and enchanting surprises at every… pic.twitter.com/udz8KeWVxQ

— Culture Crave (@CultureCrave) February 27, 2024

It’s a sad reminder that unscrupulous people will continue using AI in ways big and small, all eroding at trust overall. Expect warier, more suspicious consumers moving forward as we all begin to question what’s real and what’s illusion.

Regulation

Microsoft’s AI partnerships are once more under scrutiny by regulators. This time, the tech giant’s collaboration with the French Mistral AI has drawn the attention of the EU, Reuters reported. Microsoft invested $16 million into the startup in  hopes of incorporating Mistral’s models into its Azure platform. Some EU lawmakers are already demanding an investigation as Microsoft seems set to gain even more power in the AI space. Investigations are already underway due to Microsoft’s stake in OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT.

But the investigations reveal broader cracks in the EU’s views toward AI. As Reuters reports:

Alongside Germany and Italy, France also pushed for exemptions for companies making generative AI models, to protect European startups such as Mistral from over-regulation.

“That story seems to have been a front for American-influenced big tech lobby,” said Kim van Sparrentak, an MEP who worked closely on the AI Act. “The Act almost collapsed under the guise of no rules for ‘European champions’, and now look. European regulators have been played.”

A third MEP, Alexandra Geese, told Reuters the announcement raised legitimate questions over Mistral and the French government’s behaviour during the negotiations.

“There is a concentration of money and power here like the world has never seen, and I think this warrants an investigation.”

In the United States, Congress has created a bipartisan task force focused on AI and how to combat the negative implications, like deepfakes and job loss, even as the nation acts as an international leader in the development of the field, NBC News reported. Twelve members from each party will join the task force.

But don’t expect sweeping legislative priorities out of the task force. NBC News describes the task force’s mission as “writing a comprehensive report that will include guiding principles, recommendations and policy proposals developed with help from House committees of jurisdiction.” 

Some think Congress isn’t moving fast enough to put recommendations and policies into effect, so they’re taking matters into their own hands. California, the largest state in the nation, intends to roll out legislation in the near future to regulate AI in the state, which is home to many tech companies.

“I would love to have one unified, federal law that effectively addresses AI safety. Congress has not passed such a law. Congress has not even come close to passing such a law,” California Democratic state Senator Scott Wiener, of San Francisco, told NPR. 

The California measure, Senate Bill 1047, would require companies building the largest and most powerful AI models to test for safety before releasing those models to the public.

AI companies would have to tell the state about testing protocols, guardrails and if the tech causes “critical harm,” California’s attorney general could sue.

Wiener says his legislation draws heavily on the Biden Administration’s 2023 executive order on AI.

This floats the very real possibility that America could see a patchwork of regulations in the AI space if Congress doesn’t get its act together – and soon.

AI use cases

Finally, we know what’s scary about AI, we know what governments wants to do with AI, but how are companies using AI today? 

The news industry continues to be especially interested in AI. Politico published an interview with Oxford doctoral candidate Felix M. Simon about how AI has already descended on the industry, impacting everything from article recommendations in news apps to, yes, how, the news gets made.

Simple, non-terrifying use cases include giving AI long-form content and having it digest the piece into bullet points for easy consumption, or having an AI-generated voice read an article aloud. But the more frightening possibilities include using AI to replace human reporters, to churn out mass quantities of stories instead of focusing on quality, and Big Tech fully taking control of media through its ownership of AI.

In related news, Google is paying small news publishers to use its AI tools to create content, Adweek reported. The independent publishers will receive sums in the five-figure range to post content over the course of a year. The tool, which is not currently available for public use, indexes recent reports, such as from government agencies, and summarizes them for easy publication.

“In partnership with news publishers, especially smaller publishers, we’re in the early stages of exploring ideas to potentially provide AI-enabled tools to help journalists with their work,” reads a statement from Google shared with Adweek. “These tools are not intended to, and cannot, replace the essential role journalists have in reporting, creating and fact-checking their articles.”

Still, it seems naive to think that these tools won’t replace at least some journalists, no matter what everyone would like to believe.

Lending company Klarna says its use of AI has enabled it to replace 700 human employees – coincidentally, the company says, the same number of people it recently laid off. Fast Company reports that Klarna has gone all-in on AI for customer service, where it currently accounts for two-thirds of all customer conversations, with similar satisfaction ratings as to humans. 

Whether you view this all as inevitable progress, nightmare fuel or a bit of both, there is likely no escaping the AI onslaught. That’s according to JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon.

“This is not hype,” Dimon told CNBC.” This is real. When we had the internet bubble the first time around … that was hype. This is not hype. It’s real. People are deploying it at different speeds, but it will handle a tremendous amount of stuff.”

Guess we’ll find out. 

What trends and news are you tracking in the AI space? What would you like to see covered in our biweekly AI roundups, which are 100% written by humans? Let us know in the comments!

Allison Carter is editor-in-chief of PR Daily. Follow her on Twitter or LinkedIn.

The post AI for communicators: What’s new and what matters appeared first on PR Daily.

Measuring PR impact is one of the most difficult yet most important parts of the practice. Communicators must be able to show how their work impacted broader business goals, but because PR works in subtle, sometimes mysterious ways, it can be difficult to draw straight lines. But measure we must, and as technology improves, there are more ways than ever to measure PR.  

I asked a simple question on LinkedIn: “Nerds only: What is your favorite way of measuring PR impact?” 

Obviously, there is no one right way. It all depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. But the question yielded dozens of responses from PR pros from a variety of disciplines, many approaching it in very different ways. 

Here’s a sampling of some of their answers. I’d love to hear yours in the comments. 

Responses have been lightly edited for style, clarity and brevity. 

Lynnea Olivarez, founder and community manager, Ticket to Biotech 

While quantitative metrics are critical, qualitative analysis is underrated and also imperative to tell the whole story.

A few philosophical examples: 

• Should a NYT A1 mention be weighted the same as a trade publication feature? 
• What about a CEO who comments that more employees are saying hi to her in the hallway and just “seem happier”? Yes, we hope we could back that up (or in some cases, disprove it!) with an engagement survey, but I’d argue that there’s tremendous validation in your CEO’s belief that your comms or corp affairs function had something to do with that. 
• Or in my industry (biopharma), patient community relationships are incredibly important. If the leading organization in one’s target area publicly gushes about your company, that’s uber valuable but how do you put a numeric value on it? 

Mike Nachshen, president and owner, Fortis Communications 
In the B2G space, where the sales cycle can take months, if not years, measurement nirvana is when you learn that a customer read an article you placed or saw content you created, and then asked the sales team questions based on the work you did. 

Gabriel De La Rosa Cols, principal, Intelligent Relations

Publication reach + spikes in website traffic.

I’ve had bad experiences in the past trying to tie PR results to spikes in sales or lead generation, as sales teams will most of the time claim those for themselves (as is their right).

Most of my clients measure the impact of PR by comparing earned media ROI versus what it would have cost them to pay for sponsored articles in those publications.

I would argue that for a company to measure the true impact of PR, it would need to gather data on all of the above. 

Lindsay Lapchuk, fractional PR and communications consultant 

There are so many vanity metrics in PR.

One approach I’m big on is “penetration” or “drumbeat” lists.

Do your research and create two lists (to start):

1.The most influential journalists in your space.
2. The most important media outlets for reaching your audience.

Then track your outreach and progress to understand what it takes to move journalists along the spectrum from “never heard of you” to “trusted relationship.”

• How many pitches does it take it get your first email opened? 
• Which angles earned you the engagement?  
• What type of engagement did you get?  
• Did you land an informational interview? Was your exec sourced in a story?  
• Was your company featured?  
• Has the journalist written about your company more than once?  
• What percentage of journalists or outlets can you move along the spectrum in a one-year period? Two-year period?  

Using a tracker like this, you can not only visualize the impact you’re having similar to a sales funnel, but you can also showcase the value of the long game to your C-suite. 

Anya Nelson, SVP and public relations practice lead, Scratch Marketing + Media 

As an agency PR pro, it depends on a client and their business objectives. But in general, I always encourage each client to come up with a PR quality index of some sorts. It should include several metrics or criteria but not too many so that reporting/measurement doesn’t become this giant exercise of its own.  

Metrics we typically measure by: core messages inclusion in the article; SME quotes; publication tier or domain authority; real estate (e.g., headline/first paragraph placement); prominence (full feature vs. paragraph vs. mention); links; branded image or logo; whether it’s covered by a reporter or publication on a “bullseye” list; etc.  

Then each category converts to a point system – e.g., 3 points for a feature, 2 points for a paragraph and 1 point for a mention. Then data science does its magic and boom, we have math that carries us throughout the year and lets us benchmark our progress. Outside of the quality index, we look at things like SOV and pure coverage volume (number of articles secured), but SOV is my least favorite metric because it’s the one you’re least in control of. The one I love the most, even though it’s anecdotal, is HDYHAU (how did you hear about us?) — always, ask your client’s customers this question! 

Melissa Musiker, interim head of communications, UPSIDE Foods 

I always start with the question “what does success look like?” and build a program laser focused on those goals. KPI’s are built at the beginning of a planning process with a focus on quality versus quantity and outcomes, NEVER vanity metrics like reach or impressions alone. Vanity metrics focused on quantity must always be qualified with outcomes that assess quality. What did we want the audience to think, feel and do? How did our work support key business goals?  

For example, if the goal was to attract investor interest, did the PR program lead to qualified investor outreach? If the goal was to attract talent, did we place stories in the outlets that our talent trusts and did that lead to a better applicant pool and correlate with a higher acceptance of top choice talent? Did our key messages pull through into stories? Did we get invited to speak at the right events improved the reputation of our leaders or business with the audiences that mattered most? 

Elliott Burr, senior director of corporate, crisis and executive communications, Juniper Networks 

*Part* of our comms function is to provide air cover for sales, so I’ve always loved it when I hear anecdotal feedback from our sales teams around the world that they were able to start or advance a conversation with a prospect who mentioned they read an article we drove. I’m still figuring out a way to quantify “when PR turns cold calls into lukewarm calls,” but it’s certainly an outcome we look to influence. 

Shane Collins, former brand and communications lead, Grammarly, exploring new opportunities 

Pitch conversion. Of planned/opportunistic pitches, which are converted to coverage and which pitches aren’t. This helps 1) calibrate a brand’s POV, 2) fine-tunes storytelling programs, much like social media content testing, and 3) underscores impact over effort. 

Mark Nolan, director of marketing, Modulate 

The best metric: Days since CEO/investor/client asked “why aren’t we in this [insert top-tier media outlet] piece?”  

The post PR pros reveal their very favorite measurement appeared first on PR Daily.

What’s more empowering than reading your own story? Sharing it to connect with others.

For Sidney Alvarez, director of marketing and communications at Burrell College of Osteopathic Medicine, video storytelling is core to what he does every day. “I use my broadcast journalism background to create content that helps us take control of our narrative and humanize our brand,” he said.

Alvarez employed his video storytelling strategy to enhance the college’s narrative through a weekly series on KTSM-TV that features student doctors and faculty discussing various medical issues. Collaborating with Nexstar Media extends the series’ outreach, guaranteeing that its insights reach a wider audience, beyond the traditional TV spot.

“This was an opportunity to introduce our students and faculty to the concept of working with media,” said Alvarez.

The weekly series also led to the creation of “The D.O. Pulse”, a 30-minute video podcast that offers insights into osteopathy, health tips, education and more. Each episode is divided into three 10-minute segments and shared across the college’s social media platforms.

Alvarez spoke with Ragan about how owning and controlling the narrative through strategic storytelling strengthens brand identity and lays the foundation for future partnerships.

Responses were lightly edited for clarity.

How did “Expert Tips From Your Student D.O.c,” come about and what role did the media partner play?

Though we are a local med school in New Mexico and Florida, most of our students are from out of state. Like most marketing budgets, ours is limited and it is challenging to spend dollars locally, regionally and nationally. I wanted to create a marketing strategy that allowed me to spend regionally while still utilizing traditional public relations strategies locally.

The college’s “Expert Tips From Your Student D.O.c” is my local public relations initiative. Partnering with a local news media outlet for our regional initiatives opened the door for a local public relations opportunity.

What did you envision as the result of this partnership?

I wanted to create an initiative that would help educate our local region about our med school and offer community health tips while allowing our student doctors to learn about working with the media.

Can you elaborate on the strategies to monetize “The D.O. Pulse” show, including details on securing sponsors?

“The D.O. Pulse” is the fourth show I’ve created in my career. I’ve learned that each organization has a specific set of demographics they reach, and some other organizations/partners can benefit by reaching this same population. I’ve created a product that promotes our brand while making it attractive for other brands to want to partner with.

While searching for sponsors/advertisers, I always turn to the low-hanging fruit first. In this case, any vendors that we already work with as an organization. After all, if we are already spending money with a vendor, negotiate with them so they in turn spend money on you as a sponsor or advertiser.

How do you use social media platforms to maximize the reach and engagement of “The D.O. Pulse” content?

Our full 30-minute show gets released, however each segment is about a different topic, garnering its own opportunity for social media release. This allows me to use different strategies and continue promoting our brand with three different topics. It is also an additional opportunity to tag or collaborate with different doctors, hospitals or community organizations – all within the same show.

What is the big takeaway from this strategy that led to success with giving student doctors opportunities and educating the public?

Media training and health communications have never been more prevalent. COVID-19 had our medical communities utilizing traditional media interviews, outreach, and social media strategies to communicate to the public. In many instances, our doctors and medical leaders were the expert voices during this global pandemic within our rural and urban communities.

The big takeaway is teaching our future doctors to be media savvy and to help them understand how to take control of their narratives and share their knowledge with the communities they serve.  “Expert Tips From Your Future D.O.c” and the D.O. Pulse are platforms to help our doctors navigate the world of media.

What tips would you share with someone if they wanted to do something similar?

Just do it, there is nothing holding you back. Our show is a two-person crew, our videographer and myself. The topics are never-ending, and production is as elaborate or simple as you desire. Getting executive buy-in is easier than you may think. These shows are about taking control of your narrative and humanizing your brand.

Learn more about this topic and other relevant topics by joining us at Ragan and PR Daily’s Media Relations Conference on June 5-6 in Washington, D.C.

Isis Simpson-Mersha is a conference producer/ reporter for Ragan. Follow her on LinkedIn.

The post How Burrell College harnessed a video storytelling strategy to humanize the brand and strengthen its media partnerships appeared first on PR Daily.

Kami Spangenberg serves as the senior vice president of corporate communications, scientific stature services, and community affairs at RTI International, a global nonprofit research institute. In her role, Spangenberg oversees three crucial departments that work cohesively to fulfill the institute’s mission of translating knowledge into practical solutions for improving the human condition. 

The comms and marketing veteran finds professional fulfillment in collaborating with dedicated individuals working towards a global mission for the greater good and she emphasizes the importance of laughter in her daily life.

In 2023, Spangenberg was recognized as a Top Women in Communications by Ragan Communications.  She is also a valued member of Ragan’s Communications Leadership Council. 

My professional motto/mantra is:

I am incredibly fortunate to lead a team of smart, creative and hard-working colleagues. Each day they amaze me. My leadership style certainly falls into the category of motivational cheerleader, and I expend a lot of energy creating positive team energy around projects. I’ve been known to say at the end of many team meetings, “Let’s get after it!” It’s a rallying cry to get going and make things happen. Getting after it—and staying after it—through persistence and hard work always pays off.

A book or song that changed the way I think about my career is:

Issues management and crisis communications are key components of my communications work. I’m particularly proud of a consistent track record of helping our people and our organization navigate the tough stuff. This work demands a lot, and the pressure can take an emotional toll. I find myself time and again turning to All Things Must Pass (1970) by George Harrison as a beacon. Knowing “the darkness only stays the nighttime” helps me move through intense moments assured that “daylight is good at arriving at the right time.” George knew that “all things must pass away,” and that sense of impermanence helps me navigate challenges.

I’m inspired by:

I am inspired by the storytellers. The artistry, the craft, of storytelling fascinates and enthralls me. An avid reader and cinephile, I love nothing more than immersing myself in a captivating tale. A story told well stays with you. It leaves an impression, informing how you see the world. Stories share our memories and enable connection. Anyone who can harness that power inspires me.

The most underrated skill in my profession is:

Effective communicators tailor for the audience they’re trying to reach. Seeking to understand others and to imagine what it must be like to be in their situation—empathy—is a skill. Some may say that empathy is an ability, meaning it’s natural or innate. I don’t dispute that there are natural empaths. Yes, skills differ in that they are learned and improved through performing. But I believe that one can practice empathy and get better at it. To me, empathy is the ultimate soft skill allowing communicators to connect more effectively with their audiences. And that connection is truly how we measure our success.

One way I maintain my work-life balance is:

At RTI International, we provide staff with the flexibility to work where and when they are most productive. We have incredibly gifted and talented staff who solve complex research and development challenges to help improve the human condition. That’s no small task. Providing telework, hybrid and resident options is one way we support them to do their best work while maintaining “work-life balance.”

I chose to be a hybrid worker where I spend most work hours connecting virtually from my home office and join colleagues onsite one to two days a week where face-to-face connection seems most beneficial. This allows me to keep a balance with my personal life and a wellness routine that works for me while bringing my best self to work, so I can guide and mentor our team.

I love what I do and feel very connected to my team and colleagues, so my work happiness quotient is high. I found HP’s recent sponsored content in the NY Times, Happy at Work? How Remote Jobs, Technology and New Attitudes are Redefining the “Office” interesting. The data show work preferences vary by generation, and one point that struck me is that most of us need “work-life freedom” or “work-life flexibility” rather than what we traditionally think of as balance. That resonates with me.

 The thing I’m most excited about for the future of my profession is:

I’m excited about the evolution of tools we use to communicate. To date myself, I started my career writing at the DOS prompt. Now, I have a team piloting generative AI tools to help streamline daily tasks and another team implementing Smart Brevity principles into our workflow. It’s staggering to think about the technology evolution over my 35+-year career and how much has changed. I’m excited about what lies ahead with the promise of emerging tools that open up new creative channels and enhance how we reach our audiences. 

Isis Simpson-Mersha is a conference producer/ reporter for Ragan. Follow her on LinkedIn.

The post How I Got Here: Kami Spangenberg thrives in RTI International’s flexible work setting appeared first on PR Daily.

Ragan’s Top Women in Communications Awards is one of our most prestigious programs, saluting the women who embody the past, present and future of the discipline; whose innovations have the power to shape workplaces and employee experience; and whose efforts reach across their organizations and far beyond.

Each year, we honor dozens of communicators, but only three join our Hall of Fame. The inductees into the 2024 Top Women in Communications Hall of Fame aren’t just professionals, but forces of influence that fundamentally uplift the way we interact with and uplift one another. Their extensive experience and unrivaled expertise set them apart as champions to be emulated.

This year, Ragan is honored to induct:

Susan Donlan

Chief Communications Officer at KeyCorp

Marian Salzman

Senior Vice President & Chief Corporate Citizenship Officer, U.S., at Philip Morris International

Kathy Krenger

former Chief Communications Officer at The Kraft Heinz Company

These leaders and the rest of the Top Women in Communications, Class of 2024, will be honored at a luncheon in New York City on Feb. 29, 2024. Read on to learn about the monumental impact they have made on communications and the world.

Susan Donlan: The calm in the storm

Over the course of her career, Susan Donlan’s influence and impact has blazed the trail for women in the banking industry, in which a vast majority of leadership and board roles are still held by men.Currently chief communications officer at KeyCorp, a financial services company with assets of approximately $189 billion and more than 17,000 employees, Donlan launched her career working with the government of Canada in research and international policy, as well as advising multiple ministers. She went on to serve in the Canada Revenue Agency and the Office of the Minister of Labor and Housing, laying the foundation of her communications career.

At T.D. Bank, Donlan used her ability to build rapport and relationships to lean further into corporate communications, mastering internal and external communications, executive communications, media relations and crisis communications while ascending through the ranks to the post of vice president in 10 years.

“I have always valued the ability to listen — actively listen,” Donlan told Ragan. “You learn so much when you listen to how people are saying things, what they are sharing with you and how they feel about it. It connects you with your audience and helps you understand them. That makes you a better communicator.”

In 2018, Donlan relocated to the United States to join KeyBank as chief communications officer in Cleveland, Ohio. Once there, Donlan made sweeping changes to the corporate communications team, including establishing a leadership team and affording senior members of her team with development and leadership opportunities. Since then, she has led the team through worldwide crises and historic challenges to the banking industry.

One challenge, of course, was the COVID-19 pandemic, which hit shortly after a CEO transition. Donlan developed a reputation for being the “calm in the storm,” steadily leading her team through the pandemic while ensuring all KeyBank stakeholders were supported. Her efforts included a comprehensive internal and external plan, consumer relief, small business and Paycheck Protection Program support and continued support in the community.

Then came the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank in March 2023. The two largest bank failures since 2008 sent shockwaves through the industry, especially for regional institutions like KeyBank. Donlan mobilized the team with an action plan that supplied employees with essential information, ensuring that clients remained confident in KeyBank’s strength and stability. She also addressed numerous media inquiries and positioned CEO Chris Gorman as KeyBank’s voice in the public.

“I’ve learned how important it is to be the voice of calm within the chaos — even if I’m not feeling that calm on the inside,” Donlan said. “Experience has taught me to focus on how we move forward and out of the crisis instead of worrying about how we got there. There’s always time to reflect back and determine how to learn from a situation once the crisis passes, not from a blame perspective, but from the perspective of how we can do better.”

An active participant in KeyBank’s formal mentoring program, Donlan is involved in the Cleveland community, serving as a director on the Cleveland Museum of Natural History Board and as a member of the Cuyahoga County Public Library Foundation Board.

“The field has changed so much since I began my career,” she reflected to Ragan. “The day of prose memos is long gone — you need to be able to package your content in small, digestible pieces, focusing on what you really need the audience to know.  This can be a real challenge when you are dealing with complex information — the ability to synthesize complexity is a more important skill than ever for communicators.”

She advises other communicators to slow down and take time to appreciate where they are and what they’re working on. “I was always in such a hurry to get to the next thing, like I was running out of time,” she said. “Instead of focusing on the next opportunity or role, now I really try to enjoy all of the things I get to do and learn every day in my current role.”

Marian Salzman: Redefining the future

Marian Salzman’s career has always focused on the future — and she has consistently shaped that future. In the early 1990s, when the internet was still considered the domain of nerds, she founded the world’s first cybersecurity consultancy — holding online focus groups via her startup, American Dialogue, also known as Cyberdialogue.

It’s no exaggeration to call her a cultural icon: she helped introduce the word “metrosexuality” to the world in 2003, sparking a global media frenzy that ultimately resulted in “metrosexual” being named Word of the Year.

“People radar matters a lot,” Salzman told Ragan. “You can accomplish anything when you surround yourself with the best people, and when you work for and with people who are smarter than you are, and who share your commitment to great work, and good fun.”

And Salzman was a driving force behind #GivingTuesday, which encourages consumers to offset the gluttony of Black Friday and Cyber Monday by helping others and raising tens of billions of dollars for community programs.

In a PR career spanning three decades, Salzman has served as CEO of Havas PR North America and chair of the Havas Global PR Collective. In 2016 she moved to Philip Morris International (PMI) as senior vice president, global communications, to help the company deliver a smoke-free future.

Salzman guides PMI’s communications, media and other stakeholder engagement, forging productive alliances with NGOs, advocacy groups, policymakers and others. The end goal: making it easier for adult smokers to move away from cigarettes and toward the better science-based alternatives now available.

Using her global platform to combat misinformation, promote transparency and advance positive change, Salzman sparks conversations around important issues via her annual trends report, newsletter and PMI whitepapers — including “Hate Is in the Air,” a report that dissects the drivers of hate and challenges companies to contribute to solutions.

She says curiosity and energy are the most important skills for communicators. “If you aren’t in continuous learning mode, you will quickly be left behind.” She lives out that advice herself: Salzman told Ragan that she was taking remote courses in government at Johns Hopkins University when the pandemic began. “This engagement gave me a whole lot of brainfood at a time when socialization was largely screen-based. I developed considerable expertise by going back to school thirty-odd years after I had completed my formal education, and this made me a much better leader and professional. Studenting also knocked any arrogance I had right out of my system.”

As a commentator for a range of global and national media outlets, Salzman has been featured on the BBC, NBC News, Euronews, Sky News and Bloomberg Radio, as well as podcasts like Andrew Yang’s “Forward.” She also regularly serves as a keynote speaker or panelist at such venues as GWPR VOICE, IAA Creativity 4 Better Conference, University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business and more, and is the author or co-author of 18 books.

Her advice to rising communicators: “Go abroad frequently, work there feverishly, savor the friendships you made in the early days because at the end of a career, it is the experience collecting, the human relationships, that carry you forward and make you better and more able to face the challenges day-to-day. I also wish I had become addicted to Pilates earlier, had embraced casual dress sooner, and would have dreamed as big as life carried me. I always treasured the journey and picked bosses but never planned my career, so I wish I would have known how lucky I would be — that would have made it easier to relax more, to worry less, and to have confidence that I would never have to compromise ‘me’ to succeed in the world of ‘we.’”

Kathy Krenger: Iconic work for iconic brands

In 2021, as Kraft Heinz was navigating one of the most visible transformations of the decade, its CEO decided to rebuild the company’s communications team from the ground up. The person he selected to lead that team was Kathy Krenger, prompted by her stellar leadership as senior vice president of global communications at Hyatt Hotels Corporation, where she guided the hospitality brand through one of its most challenging periods amid pandemic lockdowns.

“I also watched as our entire industry collapsed in a matter of days,” Krenger said of her experience at Hyatt. “Even now, when I look back at how volatile those first few months were, I can hardly believe it was real. But the work we were doing then was vital, critical, even ground-breaking. People needed our communications. They needed the information we created to survive. And sometimes, the content we were developing was the only thing giving them hope. I know this sounds a little dramatic today, but in that instant it was true.”

Building upon that experience, Krenger joined Kraft Heinz as chief communications officer. Her task: Take what had been a small support function within the company and create a best-in-class global center of communications to serve as a strategic partner to the business.

Two major initiatives demonstrate Krenger’s work boosting Kraft Heinz’s reputation:

From 2022 to 2023, Krenger’s team increased annual corporate media coverage results by 265%. In addition, negative news coverage decreased to 9% (down from 31% in 2021), with 91% of media coverage positive to neutral. Kraft Heinz ranked No. 28 in the 2023 Axios Harris “100 Reputation Rankings,” moving up the list from 2022 (and not making the list at all in 2021).

And when employees reported feeling overwhelmed and disconnected from each other and their leaders. In response, Krenger’s communications team launched a new, mobile-enabled engagement platform, “The Vine,” to deliver timely and easily accessible information to the company’s 37,000 employees. To date, 97% of users have engaged on the platform, and a recent employee survey showed that 80% of respondents have greater trust in information coming from the company.

She told Ragan that an underrated quality for communicators to master is the ability to “read the room… and pivot the conversation based on someone’s preferences or need for clarity. It’s easy to forget that you may have spent the last two weeks focused on this topic, but your audience has not. They need time to absorb, ask questions and understand how this conversation or topic impacts them and if you are able to see their pause as an opportunity bring them along on the journey, be comforted by your understanding of all sides of the issue, you will have a partner and advocate rather than a detractor.”

She also touted the importance of writing skills. “Now more than ever, words matter,” she said. “Connected to words, I believe the ability to influence is a critical skill for communicators. Senior communicators will often find themselves being the one person in the room with a contrary position. Being able to explain your position without sounding like a dream killer is key.”

Thanks to Krenger’s efforts, the team today consists of 55 internal and external communication professionals across 15 countries. The team manages internal and external communications media relations, executive thought leadership, crisis and issues management, creative content generation and much more for the company.

“In an era where everything is about reputation management, and where there are pitfalls and opportunities at every turn, [Krenger] has elevated the communications function to be a go-to partner to guide company actions that span far beyond traditional communications practices,” says Alex Abraham, vice president, global corporate communications and reputation management at Kraft Heinz.

“Know yourself so you can believe in yourself,” Krenger advises. “I spent far too much time lamenting as to why I wasn’t the star of or the best at X, Y or Z. I wish I had really leaned into my strengths more, stopped worrying about other people and what they were doing and learned how to use my strengths as my superpower.”

The post Lessons from Ragan’s Top Women in Communications Hall of Fame inductees appeared first on PR Daily.

Happy Wednesday, PR and comms pros. We hope you enjoyed a day off (if you had one!) Now, we’re a day late but not a dollar short. So, let’s read the latest edition of social media updates!      

X
X News Daily posted that X is updating its Explore page. The platform will display trending topic summaries created by its AI tool Grok. User @swak_12 noted on X that the new Explore page sectioncould replace the current What’s Happening section located on the home timeline.

In other news, X announced on a company blog that it’s debuting a new Creator Targeting program. Creator Targeting will let advertisers place ads “against a curated list of premium content creators via Creator Targeting,” according to the announcement. Creator Targeting works in addition to X’s primary brand safety solutions, Sensitivity Settings and Adjacency Controls. The platform will soon feature ads on an individual creator’s profile “completely eliminating the unlikely event of unwanted adjacencies while aligning your brand to creators you love most,” according to X. Creator Targeting is described as an extension of X’s Amplify Pre-roll program, which got off to a shaky start after MrBeast, aka Jimmy Donaldson, seemingly received preferential treatment with his initial post.

Meta

Social Media Today reported that Meta is testing a Verified comment-filtering process on Instagram. This would allow users to surface comments from blue check-marked accounts first, which could help them prioritize responding to these comments from verified humans.

Threads

Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, posted on Threads that the platform is finally testing a much-requested trending topics feature. “Today’s topics on Threads will be on the search page and in the For You feed. The topics are determined by our AI systems based on what people are engaging with right now on Threads,” Mosseri wrote.

A Threads post indicated that the platform is conducting some fact-checking. The notice reads: “The same false information was reviewed in another thread by fact-checkers. There may be small differences. Independent fact-checkers say this information has no basis in fact.” Keep an eye out for more of these as we enter election season.

Instagram

Social media expert Matt Navarra posted on Threads that Instagram seems to be testing the limit on how many hashtags users can add to a post. An image in the post featured six hashtags with a notification at the bottom that says, “You can only add 5 hashtags to this post.”

In other news, Jonah Manzano, social media enthusiast and singer-songwriter, posted on Threads that Instagram is letting users take video cutouts and turn them into stickers. Instagram already announced photo cutouts last month. To create a sticker, select a video or photo “with one distinct object.” See the process here.

Mosseri posted a video on Instagram announcing that the platform is updating the direct message process for creators by adding a filter for people you follow. “Because maybe you DM a lot of people you don’t follow yet, negotiating deals, figuring out collaborations, but sometimes you just want to focus the experience on people you know in order to make the experience a bit safer and more positive,” Mosseri said.

App trendspotter Radu Oncescu posted on Threads that Instagram is testing video carousels of Reels on Android.

TikTok

Next month, TikTok will debut a local language Election Centre in the app for nations in the EU ahead of the union’s June elections, according to a TikTok newsroom announcement. “This initiative is just one element of a wider strategy to ensure that TikTok remains a creative, safe, and civil place for our community during the election period,” the announcement noted. Some feature initiatives include:

• Policy enforcement: Over 6,000 people moderate EU language content along with technological tools to enforce rules and root out “covert influence operations.”
• Handling misinformation: Misinformation moderators who have specialized training will take down problematic content, working alongside experts who can add local knowledge to capture the full nuance of each market.
• Media literacy: TikTok launched media literacy campaigns last year in 18 European countries to address misinformation. There are nine more campaigns on tap this year.

LinkedIn       

LinkedIn announced a Media Planning API tool to help agencies. When creating a brand campaign, an agency can use the API to understand the “forecasted reach and frequency of brand campaigns before spending any budget.”

YouTube

Creator Insider announced updates to mobile, posts-only feeds and free creator gifting elements. Creators can now upload videos or Shorts directly from YouTube Studio mobile. Creators can also set the video’s monetization status from YouTube Studio.

The platform also built out a posts-only feed for iOS and Android mobile devices. Users can access this feed by selecting the “view all posts” link on the community posts in the home tab. After tapping that button, users will be able to see posts from channels they’ve viewed previously or posts the platform thinks you’ll fancy.

The platform also launched affiliate product tagging on livestreams. Creators in the YouTube shopping affiliate program can tag products from involved merchants directly in their livestreams. Creators can promote products in long-form videos, livestreams and shorts. When creators tag products featured in their own livestreams, a shopping button will pop up to create a more engaging way to shop. Creators can also pin products during livestreams.

The YouTube Official Blog announced that creators can add some extra flair to their Shorts with music video remixes. Go to YouTube and hit the “Remix” button to choose from one of four remix options: Green Screen, Sound, Cut and Collab.  Here are the feature deets:

• Users can use the sound from a video as a soundtrack.
• Make a Short right next to the video featuring the artist.
• Green Screen. Let the video be your next Short background and film your reaction.
• Cut a scene from the music vid and add it to a Short.

Pinterest
Lindsey Gamble, associate director of Influencer Innovation at Later, posted on Threads that Pinterest updated its Business Manager feature (formerly known as Business Access) to create and share assets like profiles and ad accounts, assign partner and employee permissions, and more. “This is a long-awaited update, as Pinterest now has similar capabilities to Meta and TikTok’s Business Managers, making it easier for brands/agencies to collaborate,” Gamble said. “It should lead to more paid media amplification of Pinterest creator content, too.”

The new features include:

• Audience sharing to repeat popular social media tactics on other accounts.
• Asset groups. Make custom groups according to needs by brand, product line or language.
• Two-factor authentication. Business owners can make employees use a two-factor authentication process to access assets, according to Pinterest.

Sherri Kolade is a writer and conference producer at Ragan Communications. She enjoys watching old films, reading and building an authentically curated life. Follow her on LinkedIn. Have a great PR/comms speaker in mind for one of Ragan’s events? Email her at sherrik@ragan.com.

The post New social media features and updates to know this week  appeared first on PR Daily.