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.

traditional media brands have struggled to understand the difference between a reality star, an Instagram influencer, a sports personality and a creator or entertainer. This, he said, is a state of play that means a former Love Island contestant has become the shorthand for what constitutes an influencer in media coverage.

So, your preferred influencer has a million followers on Instagram. Are those followers real or fake?Even Fortune 500 companies can’t always tell. Look at Procter & Gamble, for example. Last year, two of their brands (Olay and Pampers) placed in the top 10 brands using influencers with large fake follower counts. The number one brand on that list was Ritz-Carlton. The hotel and hospitality group used “influencers” whose followers were 78 percent bought and paid for, instead of the real deal.

In the long run, influencers grab eyeballs but don’t necessarily help grow businesses. It’s all too easy to get caught up in the star-gazing aspect of it all and wind up valuing essentially meaningless metrics over actually building your brand.

If the influencer goes off-script or causes a scandal, you get tanked too. And there seems to be no end of ways for some influencers to get into public trouble. Just ask YouTuber Logan Paul, whose posting of video footage of a dead body earned him months of bad press and tough consequences.

snag your free template to put together a complete crisis communication strategy. Use this post as a guide to complete it.

Create a Social Media Crisis Scale Convince and Convert devised a great solution to this problem. They built a customer response flowchart that matches the severity of an issue, to the right course of action.

Crisis Level 1: Isolated customer complaints and questions. Crisis Level 2: Angry customers, broken links, posts directing to the wrong page, factual inaccuracies, major misspellings on social posts. Crisis Level 3: High volume of angry customers, service outages, lack of product availability. Crisis Level 4: Product recalls, defective services or products, widespread negative press coverage, layoffs. Crisis Level 5: Lawsuits, serious accidents resulting in injury, illegal employee conduct.

more than 90% of PR executives believe that the distribution of fake news and the purposeful distortion of truth are the biggest ethical threats we face in the future. Defense of malicious behavior and lack of corporate transparency were cited by over 80% of the respondents.

Today, earned media – pitching and placing stories through work with journalists and influencers — remains the dominant source (50%) of revenue for PR agencies. It’s predicted to drop to 37% over the next 5 years, with shared (23%), owned (23%) and paid media (17%) picking up the difference.

nearly two-thirds (64%) of PR professionals think that in five years the average person won’t be able to distinguish whether the information they consume comes from paid, earned, shared or owned sources.

"Whether it was true or not, this story broke and took off because of very legitimate concerns that exist in society about keeping kids safe online," points out Jeff Beringer, global head of digital at Golin. "When something generates this much conversation, media coverage, and responses from people in positions of authority like teachers, school administrators, and law-enforcement officials, brands have to sit up and take it seriously."

Influencer advertising is a subset of influencer marketing, but the subset does not speak for the whole category.

The differences between Influencer marketing and influencer advertising have their roots in the differences between transactional marketing and relationship marketing

Influencer advertising is where BANJO influencers can be found. BANJO influencers are those people with a large social media following - whether bought, built, active or dormant - who Bang Another iNfluencer Job Out without any care for or affinity with the sponsoring brand or their audience. 

Where is the Listerine crisis management?It seems that the Listerine PR team have thrown Dixon under a bus. I can’t find any support for her situation.

Influencer advertising not influencer marketingInfluencer marketing is not influencer advertising. Influencer advertising is a subset of influencer marketing, but the subset does not speak for the whole category.The differences between Influencer marketing and influencer advertising have their roots in the differences between transactional marketing and relationship marketing.Influencer advertising is transactional and short-lived. Work is orientated around tent-pole campaign contracts between influencer and brand.

The important skill sets for influencer marketing are twofold: there are hard skills and soft skills.The hard skills are data-centric skills. That is looking under the bonnet and choosing influencers based on demographics, what they've produced before, their ratio between engagement of sponsored and organic content etc.The softer skills are crucial, too - building long-term and mutually beneficial, business-growth relationships.

Optimization is a standard practice for most marketing channels. Not so much in influencer marketing, according the influencers surveyed. Influencers indicated that it is rare for marketers to ask for active campaign data and even more unusual that adjustments are made midstream.

One topic that the influencers strongly agreed upon is that longer engagements would produce better results. They believe their followers will see brand partnerships as more authentic and will become more familiar with the brand as they see it more. They also feel that micro-relationships, like one-post campaigns, are ad-like, which can discredit both the brand and influencer.

Many influencers provided anecdotes of high-performing content, especially on blogs, that lived long after the influencer marketing campaign ended. Examples of continued performance include content interaction, traffic generated to a website and appearance in search results. As an opportunity, marketers could engage with the influencer to amplify that content where it lives or extend it through paid support. At the very least, reengaging past successful partners or content should be top of mind.

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.

86% of journalists like when PR pros follow them on social media When asked, why do you immediately reject otherwise relevant pitches, 22% of journalists cited lack of personalization 72% of journalists wish PR pros would stop calling them to pitch story ideas 78% of journalists don’t like pitches with emojis

On social media 70% of journalists said they saw Twitter as their most valuable social network. 72% of journalists track how many times their own stories are shared on social media

PR campaigns have always targeted those with this nom de guerre. But we didn’t always call them influencers. And calling them influencers is a huge mistake.

What many people call influencers on social media are simply their own media brand. A major newspaper is an organized team of influencers, whose opinions and content carries value in certain communities. The top Instagrammers, nationally distributed magazines and the dad down the block who posts his garage projects on Pinterest, are all just media properties as well

The biggest shortcoming in marketing measurement is that we judge the value of the influencer by their reach and engagement, versus audience, relevance and message

Below are the full details from our study on everything from our vertical video hypothesis to the surprising results! Here’s a quick look at what we’ll cover: The vertical video and mobile hypothesis 3 important video marketing takeaways Other key video marketing learnings Overall vertical video research conclusion What’s next for video marketing?

mobile phones (smartphones) alone accounted for 65% of total digital usage, up from 62% in Q1 2018:

In all of the experiments we conducted, we consistently found that vertical video outperformed square video within the Facebook News Feed.

Create Rich Cards Rich cards are a form of structured data; they give users visually appealing information that is easy to understand and provides a flawless mobile search experience. They are Google’s way of taking advantage of the rise in mobile usages, which has surpassed desktop. They aren’t just easy on the eyes though. Analysts at Google state that Schema markups will become more important when it comes to search ranking as time goes on.

Create Skyscraper Content If you haven’t heard of or don’t use skyscraper content, then you’re missing out on a lot of SEO juice. The term was coined by  Brian Dean, who used it to boost his traffic by 110% in 14 days. Skyscraper content involves finding high performing content in your niche and creating something better, and then shamelessly promoting it.

Take Advantage of High-Performing Posts You know that internal linking is a good SEO practice. But, do you optimize your internal linking for maximum effect? At the beginning of this post, I told you that 73% of users don’t click past the first page. That means that your pages with less authority will be left out in the cold and will receive only the occasional stray or lucky click. You can remedy this pretty quickly. If you have pages with high authority showing up on the first page of the search results, take advantage of this and link to lower ranking posts from these high-performing posts. This strategy can lead to more clicks and higher rankings.

“This consumer complaint raises a number of concerns about Facebook’s privacy policies and practices,” the committee leaders wrote in the letter. “Facebook’s systems lack transparency as to how they are able to gather personal information and synthesize that information into suggestions of relevant medical condition support groups. Labeling these groups as closed or anonymous potentially misled Facebook users into joining these groups and revealing more personal information than they otherwise would have. And Facebook may have failed to properly notify group members that their personal health information may have been accessed by health insurance companies and online bullies, among others.”