Public Relations Stories and Strategies

Three out of four office workers now feel like they need to use emojis at work, according to Statista's research on workplace communication. But almost nobody stops to ask what that emoji is actually doing once it lands in an inbox, a Slack thread, or a client email. 

That's the gap Stacy Jo Dixon from Statista has been studying, and it's the gap this episode sits inside: not whether emojis belong in business, but what they're ...

What do you do when the name that built your reputation suddenly makes you look stuck in the past? 

Jolly SEO was a company founded on solid SEO strategies and infrastructure. 

But “S E O?” Ugh that’s soooo 2021.

So cofounder Greg Heilers had a dilemma. Suddenly he had a name that kinda conveyed old thinking.

In this episode he explains the surprisingly complicated journey from Jolly SEO to a brand built for...

Every brand that crosses the Atlantic faces the same unspoken question, and almost nobody asks it out loud before they've already spent the budget: should we act like ourselves, or should we act like we belong here? 

Volkswagen bet on staying unmistakably German and won over American drivers. Other brands have made the opposite bet and won too. There's no universal answer, and that's exactly what makes it a hard call to get rig...

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Who actually makes up the rules for public relations? Who decided what counts as good measurement, how you're supposed to structure a comms team, what you tell an executive when they ask "why does this function even exist"? Your local or national association has a voice in that, but the actual standards, the ones you're governed by and quoted to and inspired by, came out of dele...

For decades, PR professionals have tried to influence what people think or how they think it. 

AI may be changing something even more fundamental: whether people do much of that thinking themselves. 

Researchers call it “Cognitive Surrender.” The tendency to accept an AI-generated answer without really scrutinizing it. And if AI increasingly sits between your message and your audience, or starts doing the thinki...

Every PR person knows the moment: you're holding a coffee or a glass of wine at a networking event, the small talk has dried up, and the person standing next to you outranks you by a lot. Shawn Spitaleri has spent years collecting the kind of beverage trivia that fixes exactly that problem, real, verifiable stories about why your coffee tastes the way it does, why tea sparked a geopolitical crisis, and why every champagne bottle op...

Most people don’t experience a country… they experience its reputation. 

Long before a flight is booked or a business deal is considered, a story has already landed in your mind. A headline. A search result. A clip that went viral. A warning someone repeated with total confidence. And once that story sticks, it starts to feel like the place itself.

So, let’s test it. When you picture Egypt, what shows up first...

Most of us are waiting for mentorship to look a certain way. A senior person who takes us under their wing. A scheduled coffee every two weeks. A defined relationship with a clear beginning and a clear end. 

And while we are waiting for that version of mentorship to show up, the real thing is happening all around us and we’re missing it entirely. But the way mentorship actually works in the public relations profession is ...

As a communications professional you’ve used ChatGPT, Claude, or Copilot in the last 30 days. 

Probably in the last week. 

Probably earlier today. 

And at some point you’ve had the same experience: you put in a prompt, you get back something that’s technically competent and completely generic. You spend the next 20 minutes re-prompting, editing, wrestling it into something that actually sounds like you...

In Canada, women make up roughly two thirds of the public relations profession. They are the majority in the classrooms, the majority in the entry level roles, and the majority climbing through the middle ranks. And then somewhere around the senior level, the numbers flip. The leadership tables in PR firms and communications departments across the country look nothing like the profession they are supposed to represent. This is not ...

Most women don't lose their voice all at once. It happens slowly, quietly, and with the best of intentions. They soften their tone here. They hold back an opinion there. They make themselves a little smaller, a little easier, a little less. Until one day they can't quite remember what they actually sound like.

This episode is about that. Where the muting comes from, what it costs, and what it takes to find your voice at midlife.

List...

There’s a booming business in divisiveness. And PR is caught right in the thick of it.

Recorded at the June 2026 IABC conference in Toronto, Doug Downs speaks with Fred Cook about A Quiet Shift, a report exploring how polarization is reshaping public relations. Cook explains why division is damaging society, mental health, and business while making thoughtful communications counsel more valuable. 

They examine echo chamber...

Generic messaging fails for a simple reason. It speaks to everyone, which means it actually speaks to no one. The messages that stick, the ones people repeat, forward, and act on, are never written for "employees" or "stakeholders" or "our valued customers." They are written for one person, with one specific frustration, in one specific moment. 

That’s not a nice idea about storytelling. It’s a framework, and once y...

Reputation isn’t your shadow anymore. It’s your operating system. 

It’s no longer something you manage. It has already been decided, by AI, based on patterns inside your organization you may not even know exist. Most leaders still think about reputation the old way: crisis plans, issue management, damage control after the fact. But AI now reads every signal a company puts out and connects them across every loc...

What happens when a conference has no keynote, no formal agenda, and no single expert at the front of the room?  

The new IABC International Chair calls this an “unconference” model. And it’s one glimpse of how professional associations can evolve: by creating space for communicators to learn directly from one another. 

Also in this episode – why community, credibility, and connection matter more tha...

As a communications professional you’re operating in the most complex information environment in history. Misinformation. Disinformation. AI generated deepfakes of executives saying things they never said. Audiences who have stopped trusting what organizations tell them. Employees who can't tell what's real. And somewhere in the middle of all of that noise you’re still expected to move people. To make them understand so...

Communications has always been built around a sender mentality. We decide what people need to know, we package it, we push it out. That model came from journalism and broadcasting, three networks, eleven o'clock news, one message for everyone. It made sense then. 

The infrastructure has changed completely since. Audiences have become producers. People choose what they consume, when they consume it, and they unsubscribe from wha...

Every communications campaign you have ever built had a choice architecture inside it. The order you sequenced your calls to action. The option you listed first in a petition. The default you set in an employee survey. The way you structured a crisis response. 

You made all of those decisions. Some of them deliberately. Most of them by instinct, habit, or convention. And the difference between those two things, between delibera...