Employees Embrace Supporting 90 Nonprofit Organizations in Honor of Ketchum’s 90th Anniversary

By on May 24, 2013

This week Ketchum celebrates its 90th anniversary as a communications firm. Anniversary celebrations often include a time of retrospection on the great achievements and milestones. As one of the longest-tenured agencies in the business, there have certainly been opportunities for us to reflect, but as we do, we also plan to honor and support the future of the communities where we live and work.

Ketchum and its employees have a long history of providing pro bono support to nonprofit organizations so, as we look at the road ahead, we believe it is important for us to support local organizations and do what we can to help ensure their success in the years to come.

The 90for90 program will mobilize our global network by holding 90 brainstorms to benefit 90 organizations around the world. Each Ketchum office, business unit and affiliate has been asked to select a local nonprofit partner of their choice and hold a brainstorm to assist the organization with a current communications challenge they are facing. The goal is to match Ketchum’s expertise in break through communications with each nonprofit’s needs and interests.

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Celebrating the Past While Creating an Even Better Future

By on May 22, 2013

Ninety percent of our focus is on the future as we celebrate the 90th anniversary of the founding of Ketchum. That’s fitting because if there was ever an industry focused almost entirely on the future, on what’s next, it’s the public relations business.

We’re keeping our focus on the future in the best ways possible: We are thanking our clients for the ongoing opportunity to represent many of the best brands and companies in the world today. We are accelerating our strategy to offer services that keep our clients ahead of the sweeping changes in the ways people communicate, form communities and make decisions.

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National Iced Tea Day

National Iced Tea Day

We matched Snapple’s quirky and accessible brand to hungry social consumers through National Iced Tea Day, complete with bi-coastal celebrity Whitney Port as spokesperson and a free lunch giveaway from top New York City food trucks. The celebration engaged 1,000 fans, reached more than four million consumers through social media and bolstered sales in Q2 2011 by 8%.

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What’s New on Google+

By on May 21, 2013

Google announced a slew of developments to Google+ at Google I/O last week. Google+ combined with Google search, is an influencer management system that enables Google to build a social graph of each user and a semantic history of their web usage. We’ve spent the last few days reviewing the new additions to Google+ and road testing some of the new features to understand what they mean for audience engagement.

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Break Through Buzz: There’s a First Time for Everything

By on May 17, 2013

Break Through Buzz is the creative stuff that impressed Ketchum’s creative community this week. Check out what captured our imaginations and inspires us to keep pushing the boundaries of possibility.

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What Bill Gates and Measurement have in Common

By on May 15, 2013

What do Bill Gates and communications measurement have in common?

As the co-founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates helped create an entire industry that has transformed how we do our jobs and how we live every day.

Now, through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, he has also made huge strides in solving some of the world’s most difficult problems, improving the lives of millions.

In an essay based on his annual Foundation letter (The Saturday Essay, The Wall Street Journal, Jan. 25, 2013), Gates discussed the importance of constant measurement in eradicating many of the world’s worst problems.

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Tom Foremski: Corporate Media Could Displace Traditional Media But Must Be Audience-led

By on May 14, 2013

Corporations have spotted a gaping hole in the market left by traditional media and are attempting to fill it with their own forms of corporate media.

But according to former-Financial Times journalist turned media entrepreneur Tom Foremski, corporates are failing to connect with their audiences and there are very few successful examples of the genre.

Foremski was interviewed by communication consultant Stuart Bruce at a CIPR PR Thought Leader briefing in London last week.

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If You Won’t Risk Failing, You’ll Never Create

By on May 13, 2013

Years ago, I savored the nightly ritual of putting my kids to bed. Packing their freshly bathed and powdered pink limbs into fuzzy, warm sleepers; reading, re-reading and re-reading again the stack of children’s books by the rocking chair, and saying good night to the menagerie of stuffed characters who inhabited the bed with them.

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Break Through Buzz: Now You See It, Now You Don’t

By on May 10, 2013

Break Through Buzz is the creative stuff that impressed Ketchum’s creative community this week. Check out what captured our imaginations and inspires us to keep pushing the boundaries of possibility.

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I Think I’ll Join a Cult: The fanatical followers of Berkshire Hathaway

By on May 9, 2013

Over a blistery cold weekend, some 35,000 Berkshire Hathaway shareholders (AKA Berkshire fanatics) waited in the pouring rain for the start of the savored annual meeting. Their prizes were the opportunity to get their hands on the goods for sale by savvy Berkshire Hathaway merchants, and a chance at learning from the two peanut-brittle chomping octogenarians who run the company: Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett.

And why shouldn’t they be fanatics? Berkshire Hathaway has the highest priced stock share on the New York Stock Exchange, closing up on kick-off day of the annual meeting at $162,904. The company stock produced a total return of 76 percent from 2000–2010 versus an 11.3 percent negative return for the S&P.

The Berkshire Hathaway Companies have a key opportunity to interact and sell directly to their audiences, who also happen to be shareholders; and what a better place to spread your brands products and services through word of mouth? In addition, because the meeting has become so legendary, every major national media outlet (CNN, Bloomberg, CNBC, FOX, AP, Reuters) are in attendance for five days covering not only Warren Buffett and the meeting, but the various companies, products, services, employees and executives.

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Mom 2.0: An Outside Perspective

By on May 8, 2013

“Mommy bloggers.” A term in our industry that rarely doesn’t conjure up a reaction. The idea that moms, already a population that overindexes on opinion-sharing, have a sub-industry of online websites where they can share judgment on life, has rubbed some the wrong way.

PR practitioners are familiar with mommy bloggers as a coveted influencer group – an (increasingly paid) medium for their brand’s message. So the thought of mommy bloggers gathered together at a conference may inspire some public backlash from non-mommy bloggers and mainstream media (see Katharine Rosen’s recent Wall Street Journal diatribe on mommy conferences serving as veiled benders away from husband and kids).

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