Did you know Instagram is no longer a photo-sharing app? That’s what its CEO declared in a move to push Instagram into a land that more resembles TikTok. Today, the social media platform has a whopping 1 billion active monthly users, a base that is second only to Facebook and about twice as large as LinkedIn and more than three times bigger than Twitter. And like TikTok, it tends to be a platform generally fueled by young people. Three in five Instagrammers are between 18 and…
Read MoreWhen The New York Times announced earlier this spring that it was changing the name of op-eds to guest essays – reflecting the fact that opinion pieces no longer necessarily occupied a physical space “opposite” the editorial page – it also offered guidance on the kind of pieces that it was looking to publish. It puts a premium, for example, on high standards of “cogent argument, logical thought and compelling rhetoric.” It desires essays “have intention” and confessed to being partial to submissions that are less…
Read MoreCount me among those who ascribe to the adage that it’s better to learn from other people’s mistakes than your own. Which puts me in the perfect position for blog readers to take advantage of the wisdom I’ve acquired during the times when things didn’t go just right. I’m thinking about the moment during a live interview on Fox Business News when the host of the program (who will remain nameless since he’s still holding forth) thought it would be a good idea to begin drilling…
Read MoreBefore I saddle up my high horse, let me say for the record that I’ve got a pretty good sense of humor. In fact, when I was interviewed a few years ago for podcast on PR, I was asked which company’s public relations work I admired. I immediately cited WestJet, a Canadian airline on which I have never actually flown. But what I liked about the company was its irreverence and ability to have a bit of fun in an otherwise serious business. I’m referring…
Read More1. It gets right to the point. None of the tangential bombast or sentimentality that too often characterizes my blog openings. 2. The headline is intriguing. I mean, you couldn’t resist, and now it’s too late. 3. You like lists. They’re easy to read, digest and remember. 4. It’s topical. And we love tips. 5. It’s short. You don’t have time, and well, there are only five. While there’s a meta aspect to this post, it also conforms from what our data tells us about…
Read MoreAll this talk about the “new normal” has many of us longing for the “old normal,” the way things used to be when we didn’t realize how good we had it. Now along comes Jen Psaki’s White House news briefings, and suddenly the waves of nostalgia are pouring over us. The thrust and parry emanating from the briefing room have returned to a familiar cadence. Communications professionals are back at the podium armed with truth and facts and a distinct aura of competence. Now at…
Read MoreWhen I first read the headlines that Tesla had disbanded its internal PR department, my mind returned to a story in the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call back in the 1980s when I was a congressional press secretary. The gist of the piece was about the perceived growth of the communications function on the Hill – the trending surfeit of press secretaries, communications directors, press aides, speech writers and the like (obviously well before the arrival of bloggers and tweeters and the cottage industry of…
Read MoreFrankly, I didn’t think I had to write a blog about a train wreck news conference. I didn’t think I needed to remind public relations professionals of the basic fundamentals of event planning. But of course, this is 2020, so… Implausibly, inexplicably, inconceivably, there it was. In broad daylight. A press conference of such colossal consequence that it held the potential to upend the unyielding march toward determining the next president of the United States. With so much on the line, and with a campaign’s…
Read MoreI don’t know about you, but it seems like 2020 would have been a much more appropriate year to launch the “ice bucket challenge.” Could there have been a more fitting metaphor for the cold splash of reality that descended on our collective heads earlier this year? And again several times since. We had anticipated being back in the office by Memorial Day, although we never did say in what year. Like many companies, we empaneled what we called our “New Normal Committee,” a group…
Read MoreThere’s been a lot of chatter over the past few months speculating about what the “new normal” will look like in our post-pandemic work life. One idea that has been percolating with extra big bubbles is the prospect of making working from home more permanent. Twitter was one of the first big companies to float the possibility. The tech giant’s CEO sent an email to staff letting them know that, if they wanted to keep working from home after all was said and done, that…
Read MoreOne of the sometimes painful manifestations of the digital age is that it has forced we public relations types to do math. For decades we bemoaned the fact that there was no real empirical way to measure the impact of our work (except for circulation numbers which always seemed contrived and now quaintly anachronistic). Mostly, we operated under the assumption that the more people who were reading or seeing your story, the better it was…at least generally speaking. In short, we made do. But now,…
Read MoreI connected recently with a professional acquaintance with whom I hadn’t spoken for at least a year. In my email, I suggested that we catch up by phone, and he countered by saying that he’d send me a Zoom link so that we could converse like the Jetsons used to – face to face but from a distance. The exchange struck me as one manifestation from the coronavirus that is already changing how we interact with one another. The cameras in our cellphones and laptops…
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