Insights for Leaders Navigating
Visibility, Credibility, and Growth.
From media strategy to reputation management, we explore the trends shaping public perception and share the approaches that drive measurable results for growing brands.
Cision released its 2021 Global State of the Media Report in mid-April. The report shares findings and insights from the company’s global survey of more than 2,700 journalists across 15 countries between Feb. 1, 2021 and March 1, 2021.
The most recent report is once again full of interesting data points. Below are a few of the most compelling findings:
- Pitch Timing and Follow-up: 60 percent of journalists indicated they prefer to receive pitches on Mondays. And despite past guidance on the best days to pitch journalists, 28 percent shared they like receiving pitches on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
Reporters like to have two to three days to respond to a pitch. If you are going to follow-up on a pitch, avoid doing so before 8 a.m. and toward the end of the day. Generally, reporters prefer follow-up between 8 a.m. and 12 p.m.
- Positive Stories: Journalists want positive, “feel good stories on getting back to normal and how companies, communities and technologies are helping others.” Research-based, thought leadership content is also in demand. Ultimately, reporters are focusing on stories that will drive the most traffic and shares across social media and other channels.
- Supporting Elements: While there has been some debate in the industry about the importance of press releases, according to Cision’s survey 78 percent of reporters “want to receive news announcements and press releases from companies/brands.”
PR professionals can help by providing data and expert sources when reporters need them and understanding a reporter’s target audience and what that audience finds valuable. Supporting multimedia elements, most often images, are also of interest to reporters.
As always, it is important to understand a reporter’s beat and read their recent articles before pitching. This helps ensure PR professionals are pitching the right reporter at an outlet and have viability into what types of stories and supporting elements will be important to include. Further, as we have seen a lot of movement with reporters and editorial staff, it is a good reminder to check recently published articles to confirm that each contact’s beat and publication hasn’t changed.
For additional guidance consider attending Cision’s State of the Media Summit on May 11 and 12, 2021.
Have you ever thought about how much of your daily life is touched by artificial intelligence (AI)? Has Alexa replaced your kitchen timer? Do you rely on your car’s driver-assist features to regulate your distance from the car in front of you? Have you had a customer service issue addressed by a chatbot? AI technologies have impacted us all, and the acceleration of digital transformation as a result of the pandemic is expected to continue.
McKinsey’s Global Institute predicts that while AI is being applied to business problems across nearly every sector of the global economy, the biggest impact of AI applications will be in marketing and sales. The research firm notes that AI could unlock as much as $2.6 trillion in business value within the sales and marketing sector.
Starbucks is a good example. On Tuesday, its CEO, Kevin Johnson, told analysts that to forecast market recovery the company is relying on AI technology predictions to determine how vaccination rates will impact sales growth.
As retailers like Starbucks begin to feel and assess the impact of AI in the marketplace, so will consumers and, by extension, PR and marketing. Recently, as I sat waiting for my DVR to resume automatically after fast forwarding through the commercials, it hit me how TV advertising has been impacted by machine learning. I wondered how AI will change the future of PR and marketing communications in light of the technology’s growth predictions.
We already use AI-powered tools like Google Analytics and Cision to make our work more efficient and effective. Ideally, technological innovation should reduce the burden of drudgery and elevate people’s work, enabling creativity. Though the tools may not be available currently, the technology exists for AI to completely transform public relations. AI technologies have the ability to free PR professionals to focus more on creative pursuits like crafting compelling messaging or planning strategic media outreach.
Advances in sentiment analysis, predictive analytics, chatbots and natural language generation (NLG) are already having a direct impact on our industry. According to a recent blog published by Public Relations Today, here are some ways that AI is either helping support public relations activity now or will be in the near future:
- Speech-to-text technology – This will immensely assist with media interview transcripts and searching within podcasts or press conferences using speech-to-text technology. Following an interview, we often provide media with recordings and transcripts, using the services of our client Panopto.
- AI-assisted contact recommendations – Though they haven’t been perfected yet, tools exist that proactively identify reporters who are writing about your industry, enabling you to target media most likely to cover your news, rather than manually building traditional media lists on categories and keyword searches.
- Predictive analytics – Two PR tech startups focused on predictive analytics offer tools that help you customize story angles for journalists based on interests, past coverage, personalities and trends and predicting the probability of a journalist covering your story.
- Video authenticity monitoring – There are even tools that can be used to monitor for deepfake videos that could negatively impact your client’s brand reputation.
- Natural language generation – As evidenced by the first press release written by AI, machines can produce content using NLG, and translate it into multiple languages for broader distribution. These technologies still require refinement, but they are developing quickly.
- Sentiment analysis – Tools are also being developed to carry out advanced sentiment analysis on social media posts, media clippings, and more.
- Attribution for earned media – PR tech tools, like Cision Impact and Onclusive, even promise to attribute sales outcomes to earned media coverage if, for example, a prospective buyer reads an article about your client and then downloads a white paper. This technology is still in its infancy but could be a game changer for an industry hungry for an objective way to prove ROI.
As with any tool, it is important that we evaluate whether the features fulfill our needs and whether or not the capabilities meet our expectations. It is our job to stay informed so we can optimize available technology to enhance our business processes and improve our work product.
All this potential is wildly exciting, but talk of digital transformation and machine learning inevitably leads to questions of obsolescence: Will AI replace us? A simple mindset shift can alleviate the worry. If we look for the ways technology can make us more effective by freeing us to come up with better ideas and affording us opportunities to explore those ideas, then we will rise with this wave of innovation rather than letting it overpower us.
By adopting a growth mindset and looking at AI as an opportunity rather than a threat, we can focus on adapting and up-leveling our skills, which will ultimately result in superior work product and enhanced client service.
If you are looking for some examples of AI-powered tools that are relevant to PR, you can find a good list here.
This month WGU Washington, one of our stellar clients, celebrated 10 years of expanding access to higher education in our state!
Over the last decade, WGU Washington has helped strengthen the state’s workforce while awarding nearly 25,000 degrees to hardworking Washingtonians.
The university’s enrollment has grown to more than 14,000 full-time students pursuing bachelor’s and master’s degrees in high-demand fields. Today, more WGU students and grads call Washington home than any other state in the nation.
To mark this exciting milestone, WGU celebrated a local hero with a mural of WGU Washington graduate Crystal Allenton, on the Capitol Theater in downtown Olympia, Wash. Crystal overcame homelessness with three young children while she pursued a college degree, and the painting will recognize her resilience and achievements during her life’s journey.
With its Role Model Murals project, WGU hopes to encourage others to follow their ambitions and help make a difference in the world. Our team had the privilege of sharing Crystal’s story with the media.
Her compelling story caught the eye of CBS The Uplift, featuring good news and positive stories that inspire.
“I wanted my kids to see that you can be ambitious and you can also struggle,” Crystal shared during an interview with CBS news. “Whether it was staying up later while they were in bed to do assignments, or working while they were napping, it was all about quality time with them and showing them that I could be a mom and I could also be a person who valued education.”
Crystal’s perseverance has led her to a fulfilling career in education where she has taught music and English language learning as well as working with special education students.
This is just one example of the caliber of WGU Washington graduates – who never cease to amaze me, and truly inspire me to be my best self. As a first-generation college student, the valuable work WGU Washington does to expand access to higher education is near and dear to my heart. Trust me, if you watch the video above, you’ll see.
As the saying goes, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” But when it comes to your brand, imitation (or rather, impersonation) can cause serious damage.
What is Social Media Impersonation?
Impersonation in social networks is when accounts use the name, image or other identifying elements of an individual, company or organization for fraudulent purposes. They are not to be confused with legitimate pages like those for fan accounts, parodies or criticism.
There are many different types of impersonation, ranging from phishing scams that ask for personal information to be sent to a third-party account, to online fraud that tricks consumers into buying illegitimate products.
Impersonators create fake accounts that look like their target brand – complete with copied logos and fake account-validation symbols. It is also common for them to impersonate support or customer service pages or run raffles and promotions. When Apple released the iPhone X, for example, criminals created more than 500 Apple-imposter social media accounts to promote fake iPhone giveaways. Hopeful victims followed a link to a website that secretly stole their credentials, took their payment data, or installed malware on their devices.
Social media impersonators can also embarrass a brand. For example, a bad actor can create a fake account and share misinformation about the company. One such scenario might be if the fraudulent account shares a tweet during a real company crisis and the tweet goes viral. It could confuse customers and damage the brand’s reputation.
How to Mitigate Impersonation on Social Media
Most social media platforms have reporting tools for affected accounts, but the onus is on the user to identify and report any impersonation of them. In this regard, the first step to mitigating impersonation is to be proactive.
Outlined below are three best practices to help protect against social media impersonation:
- Monitoring: Use social monitoring tools to keep tabs on brand mentions and conversations. Report scam accounts when they appear and delete comments on your pages and posts by accounts impersonating your brand.
- Communication: A best practice is to outline a safety policy in customer-facing emails, on your social media accounts, and/or on your website. The policy can state that the company will never contact customers and request login info, payment card info, etc. And if they receive a message along those lines to report it immediately. Lastly, if scammers target your brand, let customers know what to look out for and respond quickly to customer reports of scammers.
- Security: Utilize strong passwords for your brand’s social media accounts. In addition, keep a running list of who has login access and update passwords at a regular cadence.
Fake social media accounts can cause organizations embarrassment, lost customers, damage to reputation and eat away at customer trust. Protecting your brand from impostors requires attention to what’s happening in your communication channels, as well as regular security updates. These efforts are a good way to drive scammers away from your brand in search of easier targets.
The majority of my Communique PR teammates, along with their friends and families, have begun receiving their COVID-19 vaccines, including a significant number who just received shots from Johnson & Johnson (J&J).
So, when federal health authorities recommended pausing the use of the J&J vaccine to investigate potential rare, but dangerous, side effects of blood clots, there was significant discussion about it in our daily meeting on April 13.
That morning, several colleagues had woken up to text messages and phone calls from concerned family members, wanting to alert them of the news and encourage them to keep an eye out for symptoms.
To alleviate concerns, most of our colleagues reminded loved ones that only a tiny number of people who received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine experienced these rare but serious clots. They pointed out the Food and Drug Administration FDA and Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) decided on the pause after just six people out of approximately 7 million experienced these side effects.
While this should be of tremendous comfort to people, it’s often hard to get our heads around numbers. As Dr. Ellen Peters, the Philip H. Knight chair and director of the Center for Science Communication Research (SCR) at the University of Oregon, points out in her book “Innumeracy in the Wild: Misunderstanding and Misusing Numbers,” a substantial percentage of the U.S. population struggles to understand or process data.
“The news doesn’t always present numbers in ways that people find as easy to grasp as stories about individuals,” said Dr. Peters. “When presenting numbers like the rare but serious clots possibly associated with the J&J vaccine, communicators should tell the public about the 6 people who experienced clots and also about the approximately 6,999,994 people who did not. Advising the public about the likelihood of other more common side effects, such as the appropriately 50% of people (about 3.5 million so far) who are likely to experience pain at the injection site, may also help by putting the rare side effect into perspective.”
Consider the language that acting chair of the FDA, Dr. Janet Woodcock, used in her introductory remarks at the April 14 press conference.
Dr. Woodcock said that “out of an abundance of caution, [the FDA and CDC are] recommending a pause in the use of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine due to reports of six cases of a rare and severe type of blood clot following vaccine administration.”
Then she spoke about wanting to understand events so they can provide information to healthcare providers and vaccine recipients. She stressed “these events appear to be extremely rare,” before bridging to the message that “COVID- 19 vaccine safety is a top priority for the federal government.” [1]
As we know, this had an immediate impact across our nation as pharmacies and healthcare providers canceled J&J vaccine appointments, or when possible, switched people to first doses of Pfizer or Moderna.
The longer-term implications of the pause remain to be seen. The J&J vaccine was a critical part of the Biden administration’s plans to get the country fully vaccinated.
On March 10, President Biden announced plans to buy an additional 100 million doses of the J&J vaccine.[2] The J&J vaccine is particularly important for reaching people in areas where there is limited refrigeration, which is required for both Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, or where it may be difficult for people to get two doses. If the pause is not lifted, it is unclear what will happen in these instances.
Then there are those who were already wary of the vaccine. According to a poll released on March 31 by KFF, “13% of respondents overall said they will ‘definitely not’ be vaccinated, signaling that significant hurdles remain in the nation’s vaccination campaign.”[3] The day before the halt of the J&J vaccine, two young women working at my local grocery store said they weren’t going to get vaccinated because of concerns.
Given all this, it’s essential that public health officials assure people that they’re being diligent with administering vaccines. They must also help people understand the much higher risk of contracting COVID-19, becoming seriously ill and dying from it, and how this compares to the risk of experiencing a rare side effect from the vaccine.
This is no small communication task. Public health officials will need to be deliberate in their messaging. They’ll need to carefully consider the examples and data they share.
While people’s abilities to process and use numbers vary, communicators should not shy away from sharing quantitative information. According to Peters, studies show that people prefer actual numbers as opposed to more qualitative verbal descriptions.
In her book, Peters shares the results from a study on breast cancer and mammography risk information. When people use qualitative labels such as “low chance” or “common” as substitutes for numbers, there are varying interpretations of what those labels mean. In these instances, actual numbers are better.
In the coming days and weeks, many of us will carefully monitor and assess the news closely for honest, transparent, clear and timely information from public health officials. Leveraging numerical data can help effectively convey the important messages they wish to send.
[1] “FDA and CDC announce a pause in administering the Johnson ….” 13 Apr. 2021, https://news.yahoo.com/fda-cdc-announce-pause-administering-145001962.html.
[2] “Biden announces plan to purchase additional 100 million ….” 10 Mar. 2021, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/biden-announce-deal-additional-100-million-johnson-johnson-covid-vaccine-n1260408.
[3] “Covid Vaccine Hesitancy Drops Among All Americans, New ….” 30 Mar. 2021, https://khn.org/news/article/covid-vaccine-hesitancy-drops-among-americans-new-kff-survey-shows/.
Image credit: Carbon Robotics
On April 13, our client Carbon Robotics, introduced its Autonomous Weeder, a 10,000-pound autonomous robot that leverages computer vision, artificial intelligence (AI), and laser technology to safely and effectively drive through crop fields to identify, target and eliminate weeds.
Carbon Robotics’ groundbreaking application of this technology is revolutionizing agriculture. The company’s robots are designed to self-drive up and down furrows on specialty crop farms (farms that grow vegetables we eat, including broccoli, onions, peppers, asparagus, etc.), eliminating weeds as they go. Utilizing the thermal power of the robot’s eight lasers, the machine can eliminate 100,000 weeds per hour without herbicides, tilling or manual labor, reducing costs, enabling consistency and predictability, and creating an economical path to organic and regenerative farming.
This news was incredibly unique in that its technological innovations and agricultural application make it relevant to a broad range of audiences. Additionally, because it is designed for farms that grow the vegetables consumers eat and it presents a number of environmental benefits, it’s also appealing to national publications.
To effectively announce this amazing innovation, we offered the news to select technology, agriculture, local and national reporters under embargo. We hosted several interviews with reporters both before and after the announcement published so they could speak to Paul Mikesell, the CEO and founder, about how the company started, what the farmers are saying about the technology, and how the Autonomous Weeder is poised to impact the industry.
The announcement led to coverage from a range of outlets that reach farmers, consumers and technology enthusiasts. Below is a list of the coverage that has published so far, with more to come in the next few weeks.
Congratulations to the Carbon Robotics team!
Carbon Robotics Coverage
- Ken Goldberg on robotic grasping; Carbon Robotics’ new weeding robot—The Robot Report, 4/16/21
- Pizza, picking and swimming snakes—TechCrunch, 4/15/2021
- “Like science fiction,” Seattle startup sends laser-equipped robots to zap weeds on farmland—The Seattle Times, 4/16/2021
- Autonomous Weeding Tech Picking Up Steam—Precision Farming Dealer, 4/16/21
- Farming Startup Unveils Self-Driving Robot That Uses AI To Zap Weeds—Slashdot, 4/14/2021
- Isilon founder lifts the hood on farming startup Carbon Robotics and its weed zapping machine—GeekWire, 4/13/2021
- Video: Autonomous weeding robot improves crop yield, costs—Engineering360, 4/14/2021
- Laser-armed robotic weeder hits the market—The Irish Farmers Journal, 4/15/2021
- This startup says its new laser-powered weeding robot is already sold out for 2021—AgFunder News, 4/13/2021
- Carbon Robotics releases new autonomous weeding robot into farming industry—Robotics & Automation News 4/13/2021
- Carbon Robotics Autonomous Weeding Robot—Robotic Gizmos, 4/14/2021
- New weed-zapping robot unveiled by US firm—Industrial Vehicle Technology International, 4/14/2021
- Carbon Robotics unveils a new generation of weed killing robots—Mobile Robot Guide, 4/13/2021
- Seattle company launches third generation laser zapping weed robots—Food and Farming Technology, 4/14/2021
- Agricultural start-up unveils autonomous robot that uses AI to eliminate weeds—Eminetra 4/14/2021