2018 PR Trends: Earned Media [Video]

2018 is here, and we’re digging into what look to be some of the biggest trends that will affect PR practitioners this year. In this installment, we’ll look at 4 major trends in earned media:

• Press Releases Continue Their Slow Demise
  • The venerable press release continues its decline into irrelevancy. While companies may be publishing more of these than ever, their impact continues to lessen every year.
  • Solution: Stop doing these and create your own content!
• Hyper-Segmentation of News Means Hyper-Segmentation of PR
  • Society and social media have created hyper-focused segmentation of the audience. PR must adapt to realize that no one audience exists any longer; brands and clients instead address dozens or hundreds of micro-audiences in their communications.
  • Solution: Become proficient at hyper segmentation and distributing your news to just the people who care
• Reputation Is Brand
  • The Fall of Heroes
  • The nature of a perpetually-online world means radical transparency, which in turn means disastrous reputational damage is a tap of a video button on a smartphone away.
  • Solution: Vet the daylights out of everyone in your company who is public facing and especially paid spokespeople and influencers
• Destruction of Trust
  • The Fake News phenomenon and overall decline of institutions that were trusted
  • Where is trust moving to?
  • Solution: Own your audience and focus on transparency, trust building, and real relationship building

Stay tuned as we look next at owned media in this series!

Christopher S. Penn
Vice President, Marketing Technology

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