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Introducing: #PRstack and PRgeeks.co The first is a free front end for #PRStack, Stephen Waddington’s crowdsourced directory of third party PR tools. And to accompany it, we have created PRgeeks.co, a resource designed to match these tools with great guides, knowledge and community.

PRgeeks.co is the other piece of the puzzle. Over time, we will be developing this site into an encyclopaedia of PR tips, tricks and hacks in a format accessible to anyone.

people in 14 countries will begin seeing a link to a “Tips for spotting false news” guide at the top of their News Feed. Clicking it brings users to a section offering 10 tips as well access to related resources in the Facebook Help Center. Facebook is also collaborating with news and media literacy organizations in several of countries to produce additional resources.

“Improving news literacy is a global priority, and we need to do our part to help people understand how to make decisions about which sources to trust,” Adam Mosseri, Facebook’s VP of News Feed, wrote in a blog post about the initiative. “False news runs counter to our mission to connect people with the stories they find meaningful. We will continue working on this, and we know we have more work to do.”

It’s working with third-party fact checking organizations to flag false content in the News Feed, the company recently announced the Facebook Journalism Project to work with news organizations on products and business models, and it’s one of the funders of the new News Integrity Initiative, a $14 million project “focused on helping people make informed judgments about the news they read and share online.”

BuzzSumo can help with assessing “most shared” content and related trends. SocialRank can help you figure out patterns among your followers on platforms such as Twitter and Instagram.

By 2014, “Facebook the big news machine” was in full swing with Trending, hashtags and news outlets pouring resources into growing their Pages. Emphasizing the “news” in News Feed retrained users to wait for the big world-changing headlines to come to them rather than crisscrossing the home pages of various publishers. Many don’t even click-through, getting the gist of the news just from the headline and preview blurb. Advertisers followed the eyeballs, moving their spend from the publisher sites to Facebook.

In 2015, Facebook realized users hated waiting for slow mobile websites to load, so it launched Instant Articles to host publisher content within its own app. Instant Articles trained users not to even visit news sites when they clicked their links, instead only having the patience for a fast-loading native page stripped of the publisher’s identity and many of their recirculation and monetization opportunities. Advertisers followed, as publishers allowed Facebook to sell the ads on Instant Articles for them and thereby surrendered their advertiser relationships at the same time as their reader relationships.

This is how Facebook turns publishers into ghostwriters, a problem I blew the whistle on in 2015. Publishers are pitted against each other as they make interchangeable “dumb content” for Facebook’s “smart pipes.”

Product update emails are one example where content and product teams must harmonize for a successful outcome

Product updates should be written for your true fans. That’s not to say that others won’t find them interesting, but information about a product isn’t a lead-gen tool or a sales tactic – it’s fuel for an already burning fire.

Google is launching a new “Store Visits” metric in AdWords, designed to use your customers’ location to determine whether they’ve visited your stores, restaurants, and hotels after clicking on an ad.

“…most mobile research leads to a purchase, just not on the smartphone.”

“In a March 2014 survey conducted by Nielsen for xAd and Telmetrics, between 70% and 80% of US smartphone or tablet users said they had completed or would soon complete a purchase related to their smartphone search. The study also found that more than 40% of consumers considered a smartphone or tablet their most important media resource for a purchase decision.”

When you’re ready to write PR content, these free tools and resources can help you with the process. SEOToolSet: provides information on search activity (e.g., how popular search terms are) and the demographics of people doing the query Ubersuggest: gives suggestions of keywords you might want to add to your keyword list or article content Google Trends: shows topics trending on Google, which can help you as you brainstorm topics to write about Scribe: shares the content marketing process with an integrated, holistic approach that maximizes your return on investment.

Twitter says that this change is due to “finite engineering resources” as they moved to a new platform. People frustrated with this change suggests that there may be other motives for it (one of the big arguments being that Twitter has two partners that will enable share data for larger publishers).

Twitter reach may vacillate between 1 and 3 percent on average for most tweets. So, that share to 100,000 followers becomes an impression to 2,000 followers.

AccuRanker – Automate the process of looking up how your keywords rank on Google and Bing search engines with up-to-the-second updates.

BrightEdge SEO is the first SEO platform to deliver proven ROI – enabling marketers to increase revenue from organic search in a measurable and predictable way.

Bing Webmaster Tools – improve your site’s performance in search. Get access to free reports, tools and resources.

News publishers’ “pivot to video” was driven largely by a belief that if Facebook was seeing users, in massive numbers, shift to video from text, the trend must be real for news video too — even if people within those publishers doubted the trend based on their own experiences, and even as research conducted by outside organizations continued to suggest that the video trend was overblown and that news readers preferred text. (Heidi N. Moore put many of these trends together in 2017, and her accounting is only strengthened by the new information that we’re seeing this week.)

The court case was unsealed this week, following efforts by organizations like the online publishers’ trade organization Digital Content Next to make previously redacted parts available to the public. I read the filing and pulled out some of the most interesting and relevant parts for news publishers below. I wanted to try to see whether Facebook’s active promotion of its video offerings might have influenced news publishers’ allocations of resources, and whether it is reasonable to allege that Facebook knew, as publisher after publisher laid off editorial staff and pushed into video, that that was misguided. I wanted to know whether people working in news organizations were fired based on faulty data provided by a giant platform that publishers believed they could trust.

90% of consumers said that authenticity is important when deciding which brands they like and support - up from 86% in 2017. And marketers understand how much authenticity matters, with 83% saying authenticity is very important to their brands, and 61% believing authenticity is the most important component of impactful content.

92% of marketers believe that most or all of the content they create resonates as authentic with consumers. Yet the majority of consumers disagree, with 51% saying less than half of brands create content that resonates as authentic.

While consumers are 2.4x more likely to say UGC is most authentic, when compared to brand-created content, marketers are 2.1x more likely to say brand-created content is most authentic in comparison to UGC.

Preparing for a crisis takes place long before a crisis actually occurs. “Act like a post-crisis company pre-crisis,”

“Build a solid brand narrative so that when people are googling your company it’s not just your crises news that comes up.”

"Build relationships before pitching, especially in a crisis. Have the foundation laid so that when the time comes you can have resources to utilize in the media," she says.