Verb Company clients have newsworthy stories and the press is noticing. Don’t take our word for it. Recent examples include the coverage of The Gallery of Stolen Art, a metaverse museum conceived and developed by Compass UOL. More than 40 U.S. publications and news sites ran the story, including Hyperallergic, Fox News, The Smithsonian, and Android Central, where reporter Jerry Hildenbrand tried the client’s app with a VR headset we sent him and wrote “The Stolen Art Gallery review: More like this, please.” We are proud to have helped Compass UOL launch this project in the US and of moving the metaverse conversation beyond Mark Zuckerberg’s avatar.
A second conversation we helped start is about women. On Aug. 30, Carmen Correa, Pro Mujer’s CEO, introduced the Sun Sentinel’s two million readers to the work her nonprofit is doing to empower women in the Americas and lift their families out of poverty. It is the first time Correa articulates these ideas for the public in the U.S., where we hope they will help advance the conversation about equality, immigration, women’s health, and other topics of national importance.
PR coverage is harder to land than ever
Ned’s Job of the Week (JOTW), a PR industry newsletter and website, published last month the results of its fifth annual strategic communications survey. It shows PR pros this year have worked harder on their organizations’ owned media, such as websites, blogs, and newsletters.
The 483 communications professionals who answered this year’s JOTW survey said they are busier than ever. If you have ever published a blog or newsletter, you know it’s hard work, not the kind of thing to jump on when you’re very busy. Why do it now? “Respondent answers varied widely with some describing growing difficulties around media relations and a lack of strategy and planning,” explains PR pro Frank Strong of Sword and the Script, who collaborated on the survey. All the more important to celebrate when independent media pick up on your story.
The Manager is now from New Jersey
Another reason to invest on developing your organization’s owned media, like a branded social media account, is to speak up for you when you need it. Like in the song from New Jersey-native Bon Jovi, you want it to say “I’ll be there for you, these five words I swear to you.” That’s just what @whitehouse did on Twitter this week, when it commented on every Republican congressperson who criticized student debt news with the amount of paycheck protection program (PPP) each of them had been forgiven for, many in the hundreds of thousands. It was the work of new social media director Megan Coyne, who used to run the accounts for the State of New Jersey, credited with helping Phil Murphy become the first Democratic governor to win reelection in the state in fifty years.