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If you only reach out to people when you need them, what’s the benefit for them? I’ve long believed that the journalist/PR relationship needs to be a two-way street.

I’ve often been in situations where a journalist needs something that I either don’t have or can’t provide. For the sake of the relationship, when that happens, I will go out of my way to help them out, even if it means me pointing them in the direction of the competition.

#8 – Your own news isn’t what always gets results

Finding and creating opportunities between the launches and the announcements. If you succeed there, you’re doing something right. A good example of this is when you’re able to interject your story into the current news cycle. This works particularly well when you’re positioned as an expert.

Let’s be honest – a lot of media coverage is ego-driven. There’s no shame in wanting exposure for reasons beyond brand awareness and the bottom line, just make sure you balance it with messaging that transcends ego.

Behind every effective PR strategy there are many, many questions, but the most important question asked is “Why are we doing this?”. If the answer doesn’t address a specific business need, then it is worth reconsiderin

Having learned a good representation for emoji, we can begin to ask questions about similarity. Namely, for a given emoji, what English words are semantically similar? For each emoji, we compute the “angle” (equivalently the cosine similarity) between it and other words. Words with a small angle are said to be similar and provide a natural, English-language translation for that emoji.

Using our algorithm, we find that many of our popular emoji have meanings in-line with early internet slang:

It seems that the most popular emoji have similar semantics to words like “lol/hehe” (

Many clusters emerge: food emoji on the left, opposite the work emoji in the top right. Shoes (bottom right) are associated closely to handbags while bathing suits are closer to the water and marine animals (top left). Alcoholic drinks (bottom left) cluster together with bowling. Towards the center, we see a large clustering of facial expressions bordered by sadness, shock, laughter, happiness and coolness. As we travel downwards, we can see happy, love leading all the way the family and wedding emoji.

On Instagram, emoji are becoming a valid and near-universal method of expression in all languages. Emoji usage is shifting the people’s vocabulary on Instagram and becoming an important means of expression: their use is anti-correlated with internet slang like “lol” and “xoxo.”

when a user gives Facebook a phone number for two-factor authentication or in order to receive alerts about new log-ins to a user’s account, that phone number became targetable by an advertiser within a couple of weeks

I’ve been trying to get Facebook to disclose shadow contact information to users for almost a year now. But it has even refused to disclose these shadow details to users in Europe, where privacy law is stronger and explicitly requires companies to tell users what data it has on them.

To test the shadow information finding, the researchers tried a real-world test. They uploaded a list of hundreds of landline numbers from Northeastern University. These are numbers that people who work for Northeastern are unlikely to have added to their accounts, though it’s very likely that the numbers would be in the address books of people who know them and who might have uploaded them to Facebook in order to “find friends.” The researchers found that many of these numbers could be targeted with ads, and when they ran an ad campaign, the ad turned up in the Facebook news feed of Mislove, whose landline had been included in the file; I confirmed this with my own test targeting his landline number.

“I think that many users don’t fully understand how ad targeting works today: that advertisers can literally specify exactly which users should see their ads by uploading the users’ email addresses, phone numbers, names+dates of birth, etc,” said Mislove. “In describing this work to colleagues, many computer scientists were surprised by this, and were even more surprised to learn that not only Facebook, but also Google, Pinterest, and Twitter all offer related services. Thus, we think there is a significant need to educate users about how exactly targeted advertising on such platforms works today.”

There are certainly creepier practices happening in the advertising industry, but it’s troubling this is happening at Facebook because of its representations about letting you control your ad experience. It’s disturbing that Facebook is reducing the privacy of people who want their accounts to be more secure by using the information they provide for that purpose to data-mine them for ads.

When I asked the company last year about whether it used shadow contact information for ads, it gave me inaccurate information, and it hadn’t made the practice clear in its extensive messaging to users about ads

Those are known within the agency as educational letters, whereas the recent ones are known as warning letters. For repeat offenders, the FTC could seek to impose fines.

respondents overall predicted business will become more ethical over the next 5 years. When asked specifically about the PR industry, 9 of 10 predict the profession will be the same or more ethical. This is important because three out of four students tell us that ethics play a very or extremely important role in their choice of PR as a career.

Three-fourths of professionals told us their agency or department has a code of ethics. While 92% also think the PR industry needs its own generally accepted code of ethics, only 59% believe that a dedicated organization should play the role of ethics enforcer.

These days, influencer marketing has been so constrained that there may be no value there for your customer or brand. SEO expert and Moz founder Rand Fishkin noted this last year in a tweet, when he observed that influencer marketing used to mean a brand would "discover all the sources that influence your audience and do marketing (of all kinds) in those places.”

a lack of measurement data, disinterest among social media celebrities, confusion about the platform, and general indifference towards advertising agencies — are leading more of their clients to abandon it.

Trend Pie's Ricci said. Out of 100,000 "views," he estimated only 1 percent actually saw the ad.

"Instagram is built for finding what you don't follow easily, Snapchat isn't. If Snapchat can figure that out, that will help, because why make content people can't find?"

When Snap went public, he noticed a rush of influencers asking them to include their Snap accounts as available for advertisers. Since then, many have abandoned their accounts to focus on more lucrative platforms