How to Communicate a Business Name Change

By Gretchen Hoffman | Sep 20, 2016

There are a number of reasons organizations change their names, from mergers or company splits (Anderson Consulting to Accenture in 2001) to wanting to better align their names with an evolving service or product line (Apples Computer to Apple in 2007) or even distance themselves from a product in the portfolio (Phillip Morris to Altria […]

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Influence Used Right: Big Brands Demand Diversity from Agency Partners

By Kelda Rericha | Sep 6, 2016

Take a look at this picture of 2014’s most senior leaders at the top 13 PR agencies by revenue, and the top two agencies by revenue growth in 2013: Zero minorities. And just four women in a field where 65-70% of the workforce is female. A lack of diversity has plagued ad and PR agencies […]

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Five Ways to Reuse Blog Content

By Candice DeForest | Sep 2, 2016

Copyblogger writers spend an average of five to seven hours developing a single blog post (including research and writing time). While this may seem like a significant amount of time to invest in one piece of content, in reality it should serve as the beginning of a longer lead campaign. Content continues to take center […]

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Visual Design for Social Media: Basic Tips & Tricks

By Kris Travis | Aug 29, 2016

Over the past few years, I’ve seen more and more design requests for social media assets. Now that it’s pretty clear how visual posts result in greater engagement, brands are working hard to make posts creative, eye-catching, and image-based. That’s great! But sometimes it seems like no visuals at all would be better than the […]

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How to Leverage Big Data for PR and Marketing Communications

By Gretchen Hoffman | Aug 17, 2016

Image courtesy of photoexplorer at FreeDigitalPhotos.net Big Data has become a vital tool for large and small businesses alike, with Big Data software able to help analyze the vast amounts of information to today’s organization. New, simplified tools like Amazon Mechanical Turk allow organizations and individuals to more easily collect data from around the world, […]

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Business Needs Newspapers Too

By A.wordsmith | Aug 15, 2016

The media’s been buzzing about John Oliver’s recent Last Week Tonight segment on modern journalism. You really ought to watch it yourself (beware a healthy dose of profanity), but the gist is not exactly breaking news: traditional newspapers are in big trouble. Faced with plummeting ad revenue and a public increasingly used to free, 24-hour news, […]

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What to Know About Instagram Stories

By Savanna Frimoth | Aug 11, 2016

  The Controversy Instagram’s unveiling of its “Story” feature caused some waves in the social media realm. Critics of the feature say Instagram is attempting to take over Snapchat’s specialty, a sentiment that was echoed by some Snapchat employees. Fans of the new tool believe that Instagram has improved upon Snapchat’s original story concept by […]

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What Thought Leadership is Not

By Natalie O'Grady | Aug 10, 2016

“Thought leadership” is often considered a buzzword in the marketing and PR world – little more than a spruced up advertisement for a company. However, if your content marketing pieces fit this description, then you’re not doing thought leadership. Thought leadership can be a strong, useful addition to a content marketing program and goes well beyond […]

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Women of the Olympics & the Telling of Great Stories

By Ann Smith | Aug 8, 2016

Over the weekend the Summer Olympics in Rio kicked off. Despite much worry leading into the Games over major issues such as safety, facilities, clean water and overall security, so far Rio is proving to be a respectable host. And in a time when it seems hard to find common ground, sports once again bring […]

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10 Tricks to Appear Smart and Informed

By Kelda Rericha | Aug 3, 2016

2016 has been hard. In this tumultuous political, cultural and financial climate the conversations and written dialogues have been HEAVY. Never have I so dreaded my Facebook feed. So I want to take a step back and offer some tips for engaging in these conversations in ways that make you appear smart and informed, but not offensive. Taken […]

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The Future of Design

By Kris Travis | Jul 28, 2016

What is the future of design? This question is a constant for most designers. 99U put out an article that posed this question to a number of design experts and visionaries, and they provided their thoughts on what we might see in the next 10 years. A few things stood out to me: The changing role […]

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A.wordsmith Continues to Grow

By A.wordsmith | Jul 21, 2016

June was a big month for A.wordsmith. Last month, A.wordsmith saw a surge in new projects for our copywriting and content development team, as well as expanded marketing, media and publicity demands from established clients.  All told, we shattered a record in terms of client and firm productivity. Since opening in 2009, the agency has […]

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