Insights for Leaders Navigating
Visibility, Credibility, and Growth.
From media strategy to reputation management, we explore the trends shaping public perception and share the approaches that drive measurable results for growing brands.
The benefits of lifelong learning are many. In an evolving world, continuous learning serves as an economic, social, emotional, and physical imperative, according to John Coleman from the Harvard Business Review.
Coleman also reveals that “reading, even for short periods of time, can dramatically reduce stress.” Unfortunately, it’s quite common to hit a wall when absorbing new information. When this happens, our immediate instinct may be to put our heads down and push through the content. However, this often proves counterproductive to our learning.
So, what do we do when this occurs?
Dr. Barbara Oakley, professor of engineering at Oakland University, reveals that one of the most effective methods in learning a new skill or subject is to simply stop. Stopping, in this context, doesn’t suggest ceasing our studying entirely, but rather taking a break to let our brains process and rest.
In the series Learning How to Learn, Dr. Oakley highlights methods of learning that people regularly and unconsciously do already. But, by being deliberate about these techniques, people can deepen their understanding and enhance their learning capabilities.
Sleep is a Natural Brain Boost
In a recent article from Johns Hopkins Medicine, sleep researcher Patrick Finan, Ph.D., indicated that “not getting enough sleep can affect your mood, memory, and health in far reaching and surprising ways.”
While the benefits of sleep may seem intuitive, a lack of sleep results in more than just grogginess. Doctors caution it may cause negative long-term neurological implications that could inhibit learning. According to Dr. Oakley, simply being awake creates metabolic toxins in our brains. When we sleep, we allow our brain cells to temporarily shrink, enabling fluid to flush these toxins out. This process helps increase our ability to grasp new concepts.
Our brains maintain relevant information while we sleep and discard irrelevant information– much like how we delete irrelevant files from storage to enable our computers to run faster. This allows our brains to “review or [rehearse] some of the tougher parts of whatever [we’re] trying to learn, going over and over neural patterns to deepen and strengthen them,” says Dr. Oakley.
While we can acquire new information and access it during periods of consciousness, a sleep study conducted by Harvard University suggests that consolidation – the process by which a memory becomes stable – occurs while we asleep. This is made possible by the strengthening of neural connections, as mentioned earlier.
Stop to Recharge
Our brains have two primary modes of thinking: focused and diffused. When we study or concentrate intently to understand something or solve a problem, our brains are in focused mode. Diffuse mode, on the other hand, is closely related to being in a state of neural rest. It occurs when you simply let your mind wander freely. It can happen when you go for a walk, take a shower, or even while falling asleep. Dr. Oakley suggests that utilizing both modes is equally important in the process of learning.
While all humans experience diffuse mode throughout the day, Dr. Oakley explains that being conscious and deliberate in activating diffuse mode is beneficial to our learning process. Although diffuse thinking doesn’t allow you to narrowly focus in on any given topic, it enables us to approach new concepts from a wider perspective.
Taking the time to continue your learning doesn’t need to be difficult. While it may require time and effort, it does not always necessitate the constant strenuous focus we might think. So, the next time you are losing focus or struggling through a new concept, stop forcing it. Step back, give yourself a break and allow your mind to rest.
Below we have captured some of our most popular posts and listed some additional resources for PR professionals to have in their toolkit. These posts consistently received the most viewers year after year. We thought it would be helpful to include them in one spot, creating a PR reference library. Feel free to add your go-to resources below as a comment.
PR Planning 101: Defining Objectives, Strategies and Tactics – Strategic planning is a critical first step toward achieving success across all areas of business. It is particularly important in public relations because ROI cannot be measured solely based on traditional metrics. A strategic plan ensures that there is a shared understanding of what you’re trying to achieve, how you plan to do it, and how you’re going to measure success. Just make sure you’re grounded in the difference between objectives, strategies and tactics before diving into your next plan.
Internal vs. External PR Roles – This article is consistently one of our most popular posts, year after year. Definitely a good read for those starting their careers, as well as leaders determining how to build out their team.
The Importance of Quotes – A good quote can be the heart of a compelling article. Good quotes help to tell a story and enhance the credibility of a press release, news story or speech. Words that are crafted well can leave a lasting impact on the world.
The Art of Storytelling in Public Relations – 5 Narrative Elements – Storytelling is also at the core of effective public relations, as we seek to influence reputations, perceptions and behaviors. To meaningfully relate to journalists and our target audiences, we need to tell compelling stories. We can’t simply announce news or offer a quote – what we share with target audiences needs to be in the context of a larger story to help us connect with others and show why our clients’ news matters.
Additional Resources for Your PR Toolkit
In addition to the articles above, we recommend the following:
- AP Style Book – The AP Stylebook serves as the ultimate resource when writing and formatting material, ensuring consistency across platforms and publications. To learn more read “Understanding AP Style and its Importance.”
- The Grammar Girl – A great resource for those tricky grammar challenges – when to hyphenate, effect or affect, how to use myriad correctly.
- Strategic Public Relations: 10 Principles to Harness the Power of PR – “This is the kind of book that you refer to again and again. Instead of just theories or concepts, it offers clear and concise best practices, and then drills down to the tactical explanation of how to get them done,” said Amy Bohutinsky, formerly of Zillow.
What are your go-to PR resources? Please share via comments below.
Press lists can seem daunting. In the ever evolving and widespread world of journalistic beats, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to pinpoint reporters’ editorial focus. This leads to the unintended inundation of email inboxes with unwanted content and failure to establish relationships. One master press list is not a sufficient one-size-fits-all approach. But don’t lose hope – there are things you can do in advance of establishing a press list that will set you up for success in your proactive pitching efforts.
1. Utilize Search Engines and Media Databases
One or the other is not the end-all, be-all. Exploring publications and reporters within search engines like Google and media databases like Cision both contribute to a healthy press list. Many times, the two work in unison, as Google or the publication’s site may provide the reporter’s name and editorial focus while Cision may provide emails and phone numbers.
2. Determine Reporter’s Beats
This doesn’t merely mean taking a look at the reporter’s general editorial focus. This means diving into their written work to determine their specific beat. A tech reporter does not necessarily cover both software and AI. To help diversify different topics within a subject in a press list, please see the following pointer.
3. Clearly Define Tabs and the Reporters’ Editorial Focus
For example, when creating a press list that will include both tech and business reporters, create tabs for each, and within those tabs create a column for “Editorial Focus” to be able to indicate exactly what that reporter covers.
4. Make a “Notes” Section
This allows you to keep track of how reporters respond to your pitches, specific content they like to receive, when you last sent a pitch to them, etc. The latter is important to consider when sending multiple pitches per month.
5. Create Specific Alerts
Use alert systems like Google Alerts or TalkWalker to be notified about specific topics by indicating topics and keywords. These are valuable resources when trying to identify what reporters are currently talking about. Topics and keywords can be broad or specific – “technology” would glean substantially different results compared to a type of technology such as “MacBook Pro.”
6. Keep Your List Current
As soon as you receive non-deliverable emails, check to see if the email is correct – if it is, proceed to see if the reporter is still with the publication. As time goes along, continue to search proactively for new media contacts to add to your press list.
As newsrooms decrease in size and the cadence of developing news ceases to slow, it’s increasingly important to keep tabs on journalistic beats. Just as one master press list is not a one-size-fits-all approach, the same goes for how you choose to manage lists. Overall, do your research, take good notes, and keep your list updated.
Shiftboard, a leader in enterprise scheduling software, recently unveiled the results of its State of the Hourly Worker report, which may be of significant interest to all employers in light of the World Health Organization’s recent announcement that it has classified workplace burnout as a legitimate syndrome.
Interestingly, many experts in workplace dynamics believe one way to combat burnout is to give workers more control over not only their work, but their schedules.
Shiftboard’s findings from a survey of more than 2,000 adults in the U.S. reinforce these beliefs. Consider the following:
- Shiftboard found that nearly half of American workers would be willing to take a pay cut if they had more control over their work schedules.
- Shiftboard also asked questions about the drivers of job dissatisfaction. When asked to respond to “My job is a serious source of stress for me,” 60 percent of hourly workers versus 47 percent of non-hourly workers indicated this to be true.
- Shiftboard’s research clearly points organizations to an emerging opportunity to transform their employee-retention strategies by focusing on solutions that give workers more control over their time. One tangible way to do this is with better scheduling processes.
- Finally, when employee satisfaction increases, employers see improvement in retention, labor costs and profitability.
These were just a few of the interesting responses from the more than 2,150 U.S. adults age 18 and over who responded to the survey. For the complete report, please visit The State of the Hourly Worker. Below you’ll find a few of the recent articles about Shiftboard’s findings.
- Yahoo! Finance, Many Employees Value Time Over Money, May 24, 2019
- Bloomberg Law, Perks of Work: It’s All About Control, May 24, 2019
- HR Dive, Hourly workers want work-life balance over pay, survey shows, May 29, 2019
- Seattle Business, How a pay cut could reduce workplace burnout, June 4, 2019
This is an important topic and, with the strongest labor market in the U.S. in 50 years, we anticipate there will be additional reporting about the innovative steps employers are taking to attract talent and keep them happy.
Finally, to give you some context on Shiftboard’s impact, it is important to note the company has helped employers schedule more than 245 million shifts, providing an employment pipeline for more than $3 billion in wages earned.
I know work-life balance is important to me and I look forward to more information on this important topic.
In 2010, Vocus, a public relations software company that would eventually become CISION, released its first State of the Media report. Now, nine years later, CISION released the 10th annual State of the Media report. The report shares unique insights about the industry and specifically highlights journalists’ perspectives on different topics and trends, serving as a useful resource in navigating media relationships.
As with most annual reports, the State of the Media report has evolved over the last decade. Originally, it was written as a white paper, with detailed analysis of the current state of the industry with predictions from Vocus’ Media Research Group. The report focused on the large number publication closures and reporter layoffs. It also highlighted trends believed to become more commonplace, including paywalls and online publications.
Now, the report is built around survey responses from thousands of journalists and analyzes the current trends influencing the industry. With 10 reports completed, I thought it would be interesting to see how the industry has evolved.
What Predictions Came True from 2010?
The original report was written not long after the Great Recession, which greatly impacted the media industry. In 2009, approximately 293 papers folded, and major newspapers had 421 layoffs and buyouts.
Due to the dwindling number of staff and papers, the report predicted that journalists would be “performing dual roles” and that more papers would adopt the paywall model. Clearly, both predictions came true.
As PR professionals, we see many journalists covering broad beats and needing to learn about a variety of topics that fall under those beats. For example, many reporters cover “tech.” This beat requires reporters to understand a broad range of technologies, including SaaS, IoT, AI, ERP, VR, etc. The breadth of topics that fall under one beat often makes it more difficult to develop a deep understanding of each variety of technology and stay up to date on the latest trends.
In response, PR professionals have become an important resource that can assist journalists in understanding specific trends and offer key industry experts to support the development of their stories.
Key Takeaways from 2019’s Report
As predicted in 2010, many publications are now available online and that has enabled readers to engage with content in unique ways and given journalists tools to track that engagement, which are playing a role in how journalists are evaluating stories. According to the 2019 report, 65 percent of journalists say availability of detailed audience metrics has changed the way they evaluate stories.
The survey analyzed how journalists from different countries valued different metrics. In the U.S., readership was the most important, closely followed by engagement. No matter the country, readership was the leading metric. The most engaging content has images, infographics and personalized data analysis. All resources that PR professionals and brands can assist in developing and offer to journalists.
Interestingly, staffing, a challenge that began around the time of the first report, continues to be one of the biggest challenges for journalists. Twenty percent of journalists said “staffing and resources” is the biggest challenge.
While the industry continues to face problems it faced in 2009, the third most common challenge is more recent: the ongoing conversation about fake news. CISION asked journalists if they felt the public had lost or gained trust over the last year, 63 percent said they believe the public lost trust. Though the number is high, its down significantly from 2017, when 91 percent of journalists believed the public had lost trust in them.
Be a Valuable Resource
The troubles that plague the industry also present an opportunity for PR professionals to act as a key resource for journalists. PR professionals can craft tailored pitches and unique stories, but also serve as a resource by driving new content, creating graphics and offering key experts to bolster a story.
Based on the 2019 report, it appears PR professionals are trending upward. In 2018, only 9 percent of reporters said their relationships with PR professionals had gotten better. This year, that number has increased to 27 percent.
Keep up the good work!
PR professionals, like journalists, marketing professionals and other communications specialists, frequently traffic in media consumption – and there is no shortage of content. The influx of information is constant and ready for consumption, whether it’s CNN’s running news ticker on your TV screen or a scrollable list of news articles on your smartphone’s news app, or even the personal news feed on your Facebook or Twitter account.
Our 24/7 news cycle has shown that a new story is always right around the corner to occupy the public’s attention and satiate its craving for novelty. News junkies, whatever their poison – politics, crime, celebrities, sports – can always get their fix.
Sociologists, psychologists and other experts have long speculated the effects that a constant news cycle and fixation on social media have on the minds and attention spans of consumers. They’ve cautioned that a “fear of missing out” on breaking news and social media updates may lead to more fragmented public discussion and that a certain “social acceleration” – or the increasing rates of change within collective attention — is at play. But such a claim was largely hypothetical and lacked supporting empirical evidence. That is, until recently.
A study published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Communications presented findings supporting that such rates of change are occurring and narrowing our collective attention span across the domains of social media, books, movies and other media.
The study was conducted by a team of European scientists from Berlin Institute of Technology, Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Germany, University College Cork in Ireland and Technical University of Denmark (DTU).
The team’s findings were based on studying Twitter data from 2013 to 2016, as well as books from Google Books going back the last 100 years, movie ticket sales dating back 40 years, and citations of scientific publications from the last quarter century. The studies also relied on data from Google Trends from 2010 to 2018, Reddit from 2010 to 2015, and Wikipedia from 2012-2017.
Researchers found “empirical evidence of ever-steeper gradients and shorter bursts of collective attention” attributed to each cultural item, resulting in a rapid exhaustion of limited-attention resources. To paraphrase, these cultural items rose in popularity faster than before but also fell out of it more quickly, with the researchers determining that the production of more content in less time is fatiguing our collective attention.
One example of the scientists’ findings came from a deep dive into the daily top 50 hashtags worldwide on Twitter, in which the scientists found that peaks have become steeper and more frequent. In 2013, a hashtag stayed in the top 50 for an average of 17.5 hours. In 2016, this decreased to 11.9 hours.
“The shortened peak of public interest for one topic is directly followed by the next topic, because of the fierce competition for novelty,” the researchers wrote.
The researchers found similar results for comments on Reddit and movie sales at the box office, though these results weren’t mirrored for scientific papers and Wikipedia entries.
DTU researcher Professor Sune Lehmann noted the importance of following up this study by researching beyond the effects on our collective attention and exploring how an overabundance of information affects the attention spans of individuals.
“We hope that more research in this direction will inform the way we design new communication systems, such that information quality does not suffer even when new topics appear at increasing rates,” Lehmann said.
Read the study in its entirety here.