*August 16, 2013* Want to unsubscribe from this newsletter? Click here. /I'm off to Brazil on Tuesday, and my schedule there will prevent me from producing an Update on Friday, August 23. (I teach through 9 p.m. Thursday night, then I'm back at it at 8 a.m. on Friday morning.) The Update will return on Friday, August 30./ Introducing Social, Visual, a new Flipboard magazine The trend toward image-centric communication fascinates me. There's plenty of content covering the importance of services like Instagram, Vine, T ...Continue Reading

*August 9, 2013* Want to unsubscribe from this newsletter? Click here. /Except for a terrific Social Media Breakfast on Tuesday at Lithium's headquarters in San Francisco (featuring author Porter Gale talking about her book), it's been a quiet week in the office. Quiet, at least for me. The world of social and digital media has been buzzing. Let's get to it./ The destination website, reborn In 2009, Steve Rubel -- Edelman's chief content officer -- proclaimed that the era of the destination website was over. Destinat ...Continue Reading

*August 2, 2013* Want to unsubscribe from this newsletter? Click here. /It's good to be off the road! I've had time to blow through client work but also to write some posts I've been thinking about. I hope your summer is treating you well!/ PR must abide by and overcome search restrictions on native advertising Google has doubled down on its rejection of native advertising, adding language to its official policies that requires webmasters to include the rel=nofollow in links within sponsored content. That means they ...Continue Reading

*July 26, 2013* Want to unsubscribe from this newsletter? Click here. /After delivering a keynote address and two breakout sessions at an internal conference of marketers, communicators and others from BJC Healthcare in St. Louis, I'm off the road for a while. That's good, since travel nightmares have plagued me during my last two trips -- for the first time ever, I've been stranded overnight twice in one week! I'm looking forward to time at home and in the office before I head off to Sao Paulo, Brazil in late August. ...Continue Reading

*July 19, 2013* Want to unsubscribe from this newsletter? Click here. /I've spent most of the week in Canada with the World Council of Credit Unions, where I moderated a panel I've been working with for a couple of months. We spoke to about 300 people in a standing-room-only session where we talked about how credit unions can apply social media in their efforts to attract younger customers. I also gave a two-hour overview of social media to a group of young credit union professionals, and made the social media case to ...Continue Reading

*July 12, 2013* Want to unsubscribe from this newsletter? Click here. /This week, while conducting social media training programs for the International Monetary Fund in Washington, D.C., I delivered a presentation on social visual communication for the first time. This is a vital topic for communicators, given that 50% of the items that find their way into your Facebook news feed are images and social visual tools like Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram and Vine have exploded (thanks largely to the shift to mobile content c ...Continue Reading

*July 5, 2013* Want to unsubscribe from this newsletter? Click here. /I hope my fellow American readers had a fantastic Fourth of July. I'm sure some of you are still enjoying a long weekend. Despite the holiday break, there was still plenty of news and no shortage of studies and reports released. This week's wrap is heavily dominated by studies and surveys, but there's also a new Twitter feature one can only hope finds its way into all tweets. / This week on FIR I have a list of blog posts I wanted to write this wee ...Continue Reading

*June 28, 2013* Want to unsubscribe from this newsletter? Click here. I spent much of this week in New York for IABC's annual World Conference, where the a lot of sessions focused on digital and social media. I was happy to see a lot of sessions looking at communication strategies, and even one in which a dynamic culture change program for a coffee company with a lot of retail outlets (not Starbucks) focused on print, which makes perfect sense for retail employees who don't work on computers. (It was brilliant!) If yo ...Continue Reading

*June 21, 2013* Want to unsubscribe from this newsletter? Click here. /The volume of news of interest to PR and marketing professionals this past week was impressive, and a lot of the stories you may have missed focused on the growing importance of video. Thus, video dominates much of the reporting in this week's Update. As you read this (assuming you're reading it on Friday), I'm on my way to New York for the IABC World Conference. Given recent turmoil and disclosures, it should be a fascinating conference, especiall ...Continue Reading

*June 14, 2013* Want to unsubscribe from this newsletter? Click here. /Much of the buzz this week has focused on PRISM and the disclosures around government access to metadata from your phone calls. Some less controversial news also earned a fair amount of buzz, such as Facebook's launch of hashtags (which we'll get to in the roundup from around the Web a bit later in this update). As for me, I have a quick overnighter next week to speak at an internal social media conference at Expedia headquarters in Seattle, then I ...Continue Reading