New year, new content

If you already subscribe to our monthly newsletter, aptly named the Press Box, you might’ve noticed we’re doing things a little differently this year. Don’t worry, we’re still sharing some of our latest client news and celebrating our office culture, but we’ve added a section we’re calling “The Rundown” which will keep you informed of the latest media relations, content marketing and social media trends we’re seeing. We like to think of it as the Skimm or NextDraft for PR (and marketing) folks (or at least it’s what we’re striving for).

To show you what we mean, here’s The Rundown from January’s Press Box:

Watch this.

You may have seen our recent Facebook Live debut. Already a widespread marketing tactic, video will continue to grow this year. Don’t believe us? PR Daily agrees, and HubSpot has dubbed 2017 “the year of video marketing.”

AMPed-up

Google is working on the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project, an open-source initiative to improve the mobile web experience. In short, AMPs are “HTML pages that take advantage of various technical approaches to prioritize speed and a faster experience for users by loading content almost instantaneously.”

The result: faster page download speeds and expanded exposure for sites that create AMP pages. We wanted to know: How will it impact SEO? What does it mean for marketers? What are the pros and cons?

P.S. AMP also is coming to HubSpot.

Dear, media: Can we be friends again? — Facebook

Facebook has faced recent criticism for the role it played in distributing fake news and misinformation during the 2016 election. After a few flubs in responding to that criticism, Facebook just announced a new initiative called the Facebook Journalism Project.

The initiative will allow for “deeper collaboration” with news organizations as it develops new “products,” provides more training to journalists and promotes news literacy. Will it work? Stay tuned.

¿Qué? Quoi? 

If your customers speak different languages, then your content marketing strategy needs to do the same. And that means more than simply running your posts through Google Translate.

Tear down the wall.

Many companies’ initial response to employees using social media was creating a firewall that blocked all social sites from office PCs. But employees are some of an organization’s best advocates, so why not empower them to support your social strategy?

The beat goes on.

How much power can celebrities and influencers have on the success of a brand? Probably more than you think. This recent article in AdWeek highlights how Beats used celebrity marketing to take control of the $2.2 billion headphone category.

What’s on your mind? Thought leadership edition.

When it comes to social platforms, companies with a B2B orientation typically default to LinkedIn, but in this piece from PR Week, Frank Washkuch makes the case that Facebook is the optimal place for thought leadership, mostly because it’s “where people live.”

Like what you see? Then subscribe here or click the subscribe button below, before our February issue goes out.