Resource Hub for Strategic Communication Professionals
Looking for guidance? Explore our strategic communications topics in the categories dropdown below and use the search bar to quickly find relevant articles.
The Anatomy of an Apology: GoFundMe
Last week, GoFundMe made headlines when news broke that it had been automatically creating donation pages for nonprofit organizations without their knowledge or consent.
Eventually, the organization realized an apology was necessary and rolled one out. Here’s a breakdown.
Find Your Niche: Spooky Lakes Month
When it comes to content, the temptation is to cast a wide net. Go broad, appeal to the masses, rack up followers. But those waters are crowded. The creators who stand out are the ones who pick a lane and stay there by offering something so specific that their audience can’t find it anywhere else. That’s where loyalty lives.
Take TikTok creator Geo Rutherford. She’s built an audience of 1.8 million followers around a single, unlikely niche: haunted hydrology.
Short Takes: Rock On, Anthropologie
If you are an Anthropologie shopper, you’re probably in on the joke that sometimes the brand sells seemingly simple products for laughably high prices. Here’s a short take on a prank that started circulating on social media — and how Anthropologie responded.
Lessons in Apologizing From a Beauty Guru
At just 25 years old, James Charles is one of the titans of the beauty influencer sphere. With his personal Instagram account amassing 20 million followers and his YouTube channel boasting 24 million followers, he’s one of biggest names in the beauty industry.
He’s also, we acknowledge, a controversial character. But despite the scandals, admissions, and allegations, he knows how to deliver one heck of a corporate apology.
Oura’s Crisis Response: From Conspiracy to Clarity
When you offer a complicated product or service, you get the joy of doing double the work to ensure your message is understood. Often, this means taking off our marketing and PR hats for a moment and putting on our translator hats. We need to cut out the industry jargon that no one outside our ecosystem understands (what PR consultant Scott Merritt recently called “jargon monoxide”) and simplify processes until they’re clear at the most basic level.
What happens when you don’t? Oura, a company that makes wearable fitness tracking rings, learned the hard way.
A Tennis Match, a Hat, and a Crisis Response Gone Awry
The US Open is underway, and this year’s tournament is also serving up some great lessons in communications and marketing strategy. One match provided an important case study in crisis response.
Your Best Content Is Already Written
We see it all the time: organizations tying themselves in knots trying to churn out new content and falling into the trap of thinking content is going to be stale right after posting it. But new content is time-consuming and resource-intensive. What if you worked smarter instead of harder?
Jet2’s Viral Moment Gone to Waste
A 2022 Jet2 commercial is providing the soundtrack for one of social media’s biggest trends this summer. The brand, though, hasn’t done much with the opportunity. Why?
Short Takes: A Boat and a Brand Collab
If you’ve spent any length of time on the internet in the past few weeks, it’s likely you heard about the mega-viral video series about the 29-year-old man who quit his job, liquidated his 401k, bought a sailboat, and planned to sail from Oregon to Hawaii with his rescue cat and minimal experience sailing.
One savvy marketer from E.L.F., the cosmetics company, saw a brilliant opportunity to make a splash (pun totally intended).
Lessons From the Reputation Re-Record That Never Dropped
Good communicators know how to seize a cultural moment to capture attention for their brand. Great communicators sense those moments coming, prepare in advance, and are first to jump into the conversation. Amazing communicators know how to make the most of it when things don’t go according to plan — a lesson illustrated by a couple of brands when Taylor Swift made a move we weren’t expecting.
Facebook's Ad Policies Require Early Planning
If you’ve ever tried to boost a post about a community event, a nonprofit initiative, or even a book club meetup, only to be met with a blunt “Ad Disapproved” message from Facebook, you’re not alone.
What many people don’t realize is that Facebook requires anyone who wants to run ads on topics it deems “social” or “political” to go through an ad authorization process. That includes verifying your identity, confirming your location, and disclosing who’s paying for the ad. Even if you’re not campaigning for office or lobbying Congress, you might still fall under these rules.
The best course of action? Take steps early to make sure you don’t run into roadblocks.