Determining how to best handle Wikipedia entries when you are in public relations remains challenging. Wikipedia articles continue to load at the top in search results as Wikipedia remains the sixth most popular website in the world. This makes it a site not to be ignored, and the impact of Wikipedia can be especially profound … Continue reading Rules for Wikipedia Editing for Public Relations
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Wikipedia and public relations professionals have a long history. Since at least 2006, Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, has asked public relations professionals to follow the “bright line” rule and make requests for changes to their company or client’s Wikipedia page through “Talk” pages instead of directly editing. In 2012, I conducted a survey of … Continue reading There’s Improvement, but Problems with Wikipedia’s Bright Line Rule Continue →
Results of an experiment testing whether message or medium is more important when dealing with a crisis highlights the importance of choosing proper communication channels. The experiment included 1,677 participants who were given a fictional crisis scenario and one of three message types (information, apology, sympathy) via one of three mediums (newspaper, blog, twitter). Three … Continue reading Medium is Still the Message in a Crisis →
Perhaps no group of people possesses more sensitive, important and potentially damaging information about an organization than its employees. Given this concern over social media image, organizations are crafting social media policies that limit what employees can say about their employers online. Since PR practitioners are often viewed as social media gurus, crafting these social … Continue reading Free Speech v. Social Media: Is Your Policy Legal? →
Growing up in a world full of technological advances, millennials (ages 13-29) consider social media to be an integral part of their lives. More than half the number of Facebook users in the United States are between the ages of 18 and 29, making this generation a prime public for organizations wanting to build online … Continue reading Facebook, Millennials and the Relationship Game →
I’m sure it’s happened to all of us. A brainstorm on how to engage employees is humming along when inevitably, someone utters the phrase that stops the conversation cold: “Our internal technology won’t support that.” With so much social technology in the marketplace, and so many companies using that technology to engage external constituents, it’s … Continue reading Don’t Let Technology Be An Excuse →
With the tremendous growth of social media in public relations, using research and insights to guide decision-making and strategy relating to social media has never been as important as it is today. Along with the increase of social media research, more organizations are making their research publicly available. Similarly, colleges and universities are adopting open … Continue reading The Best Social Media Research in 2013: What’s Your Favorite Study? →
Since social and other emerging media (including Twitter, social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn plus Wikis such as Wikipedia) are having a significant impact on public relations practice, the Institute for Public Relations initiated its Social Science of Social Media Research Center in 2012. Recently, the three research editors of this center were asked … Continue reading Top 10 Social Media Research Articles Important for Public Relations from the First Half of 2013 →
Most public relations practitioners would agree that blogs have significantly influenced how organizations communicate. Blogs cover a vast number of topics and there are several types – personal, organizational, news, etc. Organizational blogs are beneficial for their ability to bypass gatekeepers like the media, but in reality few people regularly read an organization’s blog. News … Continue reading Intermedia Agenda Building of the Blogosphere →
The Russian translation of this interview is available at below. Today I am talking with Evgeniy Larionov, CEO of the agency Ex Libris, based in Moscow, Russia. Ex Libris specializes in place branding, public relations research, traditional and social media measurement, and media monitoring. Evgeniy, it was nice to see you take a leading role in … Continue reading Five Minutes with… Evgeniy Larionov →
Paul Holmes’ May 3rd blog, “10 Ways to Design the PR Agency of the Future,” (recently summarized here at IPR Conversations by Alyssa Hubbell on June 26th) challenged PR to put “big data at the center” and to provide “insight to drive meaningful creativity.” The scope of that challenge is hard to overstate, and it … Continue reading The Science beneath the Art of Communications Research – Update, Spring 2013 →
Wigley, Shelley, & Zhang, Weiwu (2011). A study of PR practitioners’ use of social media in crisis planning. Public Relations Journal, 5(3). Summary This study is one of the few attempts to investigate how public relations practitioners use social media in crisis planning and crisis communication as well as in ordinary situations. A survey exploring … Continue reading A study of PR practitioners’ use of social media in crisis planning →