✅ Monday Briefing #21: Academic insight, Exploring PR, reputational risk, tool gig, less type more talk, 24-hour tweet, mental health half hour, and more

Industry news, must read, practice, tools, social media and platforms, and events

Good morning. My name is Stephen Waddington. This is a weekly summary of news from my blogs and topics discussed in a community of practice that I run on Facebook. You’d be welcome to join us. My thanks to all the contributors.

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Industry news

🎓 ACADEMIC INSIGHT: PA has announced a deal with The Conversation to share research from UK academics with its editorial clients. It aims to make academic content more widely available to the local and mainstream media. Spotted by: Alan Morrison.

🔧 MARKETER’S TOOLKIT 2021: Warc has published a toolkit of marketing challenges facing brands in 2021. These include: responding to recession, e-commerce effectiveness, engaging at-home consumers and working on the closed web. Spotted by: Stephen Waddington.

📱 ONLINE MEDIA MERGER: BuzzFeed is acquiring HuffPost bringing together two of the largest players in digital media. It’s part of a larger deal between Verizon Media, HuffPost’s owner, and BuzzFeed. Spotted by: Sarah Waddington.

Must read

🔎 PRIMARY RESEARCH: Research is a critical function for PR teams to identify audiences and insights. Start-up platform First Round has published a useful primer for teams that don’t have a research function. Spotted by: David Brain.

📕 EXPLORING PR: There’s a new title and co-editor for the fifth edition of the industry textbook. I’ve spent three years working with Ralph Tench and a community of 50 contributors to produce Exploring PR and Management Communication. It’s published by Pearson in December. Source: Stephen Waddington.

Practice

🚇 SONY SENSATION: Sony turned Oxford Circus underground station into a gaming fortress for the launch of the PlayStation 5. Spotted by: Richard Bagnall.

📻 MUST LISTEN: In two special episodes of Digital Download host Paul Sutton spoke to Gini Dietrich, Katy Howell, Rax Lakhani, James Whatley and myself about what we’ve learnt from the past nine months and 2021. Source: Stephen Waddington.

Tools

😠 REPUTATIONAL RISK: BOLDT has launched an ESG risk and reputation platform. Riskr automates the cross-indexing of data from media, social media, investor reports and other sources against ESG factors. Spotted by: Stephen Waddington.

💬 BBC TEXT-TO-SPEECH: BBC News has debuted a synthetic voice to read articles to those visiting the BBC website. The text-to-speech tool was built in collaboration with Microsoft and generates a human-sounding voice aimed to mimic news presenters. Spotted by: Kerry Sheehan.

🗳 TOOL GIG: A community poll revealed the tools most commonly used by practitioners. Workflow and messaging were the most popular including Google Docs, Microsoft, Slack, Trello, WhatsApp and Zoom. Tools are the topic of a PRMoment event on Thursday. Source: Stephen Waddington.

📞 LESS TYPE MORE TALK: Insight from Harvard Business Review suggests that speech is better than text and video conferencing for developing relationships. It suggests using text for quick updates, video for introductions, otherwise pick up the phone. Source: Stephen Waddington

Social media and platforms

💬 TWITTER CONVERSATION: Twitter’s head of editorial Gordon MacMillan set out five ways in which brands are using Twitter’s conversation settings. These include: sharing values, brand messaging as well as Q&A. Spotted by: Stephen Waddington, Nigel Sarbutts and Andrew Bruce Smith.

🕐 24-HOUR TWEET: Twitter has followed TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn in launching a story format. The reception has been muted. Users would prefer the platform directed its engineering effort into an edit function. Spotted by: Stephen Waddington.

Events

📆 MENTAL HEALTH HALF HOUR: Mental health and wellbeing expert Chatelle Jeram will join the community and lead a series of four sessions to help understand why we're feeling the way we are and what we can do about it. These will kick off on Wednesday 2 December at 4pm GMT and run for 30 minutes. Source: Stephen Waddington.