From Oscars Flub to Fake News: What We’re Reading Now

By Jackie Sofia

‘Envelopegate’ and the Power of Public Memory
The PR nightmare continues for PwC in the wake of this year’s Academy Awards, during which the accounting giant somehow mixed up the envelopes announcing the coveted “Best Picture” award winner. Jaws were left visibly hanging after Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway handed the golden man to the wrong man.

After the debacle, PwC was spotted on Twitter trying to bury their shame amongst unrelated news content about the firm. The distraction was not very effective; CBS News reports that the two individual accountants involved will never work the Oscars again, and the relationship of the entire firm is “under review.” While PwC’s reputation is now tarnished, they may have inadvertently buffed up the image of several other accounting firms just in time for tax season. One man’s loss is another man’s win.

An Instagram How-To: Multiple Image Posts
Instagram continues to advance its offerings for users. A new feature allows users to post multiple photos at once with a slideshow effect. The digital flip book allows you to post up to 10 photos simultaneously and already has been implemented widely by advertisers on the platform.

Marketers can use this feature to relay more extensive messages to their audience, or get creative and compile step-by-step guides for their products and services. Speaking of step-by-step guides, here’s a tutorial explaining how to use the new feature.

What the CIA is Saying About the New Wikileaks Document (Vault7) 
Wikileaks released its latest batch of CIA documents, a series titled “Vault7.” It’s a cool name, but the contents may be more sobering. The information released this past week includes thousands of documents that describe software tools and techniques for breaking into people’s phones, televisions and other electronic devices.

CIA spokesman, Dean Boyd, said of the surprise release, “We do not comment on the authenticity or content of purported intelligence documents.”  Michael Hayden, the former CIA and NSA director, tried to further soften the blow by assuring viewers on CBS’ The Late Show that these purported tools would not be used inside the U.S. unless a domestic agency received court permission. The jury is still out on whether these leaked documents will be followed up with additional details, and whether the agency will have to come up with a more pointed public response on the matter.

Facebook Launches ‘Fake News’ Flag
Facebook has finally taken steps towards identifying “fake news” on its platform. The company launched the beta version of a two-pronged initiative back in December, which allows users to “dispute” an article if they think it’s fake. The reported dispute is then passed on to third-party fact checkers who determine whether the article receives the label permanently.

Granted, Facebook isn’t known for its transparency, so it’s unclear whether this will be a truly crowdsourced initiative, or whether a select few will have their say on the back end.

Meanwhile, be prepared for disputes over whether a news source should be marked as disputed.

Battle Alternative Facts with a Customized, Fact-Based Infographic
If you still have reservations as to whether Facebook is doing enough to combat the spread of fake news, take your own initiative and fight the good fight with a sharp infographic. People process visual content 600,000 times faster than text, and retain 80 percent of what they can see, compared to only 20 percent of what they read.

This is reason enough to ensure that your visual content doesn’t get buried among all the alternative facts. We’re digging this step-by-step hack for uploading custom-sized graphics along with your Facebook posts.

The Importance of Color Selection in Website Artwork

By Heather Truitt

How important is the color of the artwork you select for your website or your blog? It is critical in ensuring that your viewers see a harmony between your overall brand, your website and the images used on the site and on any associated social media channels.

Color powerfully conveys emotion. And it doesn’t have to be heavy-handed; some of the best websites reflect a brand designed with a minimal palette of colors.

After the color palette for your brand has been developed, you want to make sure that you stick to that palette when creating any website art – even the thumbnail art you may create to use to anchor blog posts. From graphics, to buttons, to infographics, it is important that all elements used on your blog or website keep within the chosen palette of colors in order to reinforce consistency and brand awareness.

For example, what colors come to mind when you think of the following brands?

• Target
• CVS
• Walmart
• Gap
• Starbucks

Red, red, blue, blue, and green.

Target uses red for everything on their website design; from the logo, menu bars, and “add to cart” button, everything is consistently colored an identical red.

The same can be said for Walmart, Starbucks, CVS, Best Buy, and the list could go on to encompass the majority of major retailers.

You associate each of these companies with the colors of their brand. In fact, sometimes the association between the company and the logo in combination with its color can be so strong that companies have taken their name off of their signage. Target, for example, will often use only the red bullseye, and Starbucks often will use only its siren logo.

Maintaining color consistency of images and graphics placed on your website or blog is vital, not only for major retailers, but for small companies, too. Keeping your brand consistent throughout all mediums and platforms reinforces customer recognition and retention and strengthens your brand.

How do you use color in your website artwork? Let us know in the comments.

Show Me the Sources

There’s an old saying in the market research industry: “If you torture the data long enough, it will confess.” If you’re not sure what that means, take a look at a good post this week on Fast Company’s design blog about infographics and how misleading they can be.

We’ve written previously on The PR Lawyer about the power of “showing instead of telling,” and infographics continue to be a fantastic way to quickly present often complicated information to an audience that’s short on time or attention. The problem, as the Fast Company post illustrates, is that the visual channel employed by infographics can also be used to mislead.

The best way to guard against this in your data presentations, visual or otherwise, is to cite your sources. Whenever possible, the citations should be presented in conjunction with the visual data you’re presenting. In some formats, though, this isn’t possible without crowding the data or compromising readability.

If that’s the case, borrow a page from academia’s playbook and put a “Notes” slide or section at the conclusion of your slide deck or infographic. At a bare minimum, provide a link to a web page or other document that provides the sources for your data. If you collected and compiled the data yourself, have a description of your methodology available. What did you count? Who did you survey? When, and for how long? How did you filter the results?

If you’re presenting to a live audience, keep a handful of hard copies of this information on hand. If someone asks for it, you don’t want to be caught empty-handed.

Even if your infographic’s data is ironclad and properly sourced, be careful about using visual cues to make ideas appear more important than they may actually be. Emphasizing information that bolsters the message you’re sending is fine. It’s better than fine – it is, in fact, exactly what you should be doing. Just be mindful that when you push that method too far, the lens you provide your audience stops merely presenting a particular viewpoint and instead begins to distort. When you do that, a perceptive audience will tune you out … or worse.

Res Ipsa Loquitur: Showing Instead of Telling

By Sarah Larson

Twitter threw its 200-million-plus users for a loop at the end of October when it suddenly began embedding photos and videos directly into those users' personalized feeds.

The famously terse social media channel had remained resolutely photo-free since its launch in 2006. Users could upload a profile picture, but if they wanted to share photographs, they had to do so through links.

But as Twitter evolved, so too did its audience's expectations, growing amidst increasing pressure from the meteoric rise in popularity of visual powerhouses Pinterest and Instagram.

One of today's leading social media services, Twitter first gave voice to millions of over-sharing narcissists who then turned their streams into their own personal newswire services. From there, Twitter quickly developed into the Internet's de facto breaking news service, and now is the primary source of news for a whopping 8 percent of U.S. adults.

Not bad for a 7-year-old.

Twitter, though, soon found itself in much the same position as a storied news icon - The New York Times. Though the nation's paper of record printed its first photograph in 1896, The Gray Lady stubbornly held out for decades against the everyday use of color photography. It wasn't until 1997 that the first color photo appeared on the front page of the Times.

The Times, and Twitter, both yielded to a principle that science has shown to be true; the human brain processes visual information faster and stores it deeper and longer than it does textual information.

Twitter touted its new "rich tweets" as a way to bring one's followers "closer to what's happening," but it's difficult to escape the implicit concession from the Model T of microblogs: textual content no longer can be relied upon to hold an audience's interest, even when that text has been whittled down to bursts of no more than 140 characters.

So if we know a picture really is worth a thousand words, what does that mean for those of us who market professional service firms? Great photos on Pinterest might help Nordstrom sell more clothes and crowdsourcing campaigns on Instagram might be right for Red Bull but how does that apply to my law firm?

Creative and effective use of visuals is just as important for professional services organizations as it is for retailers. Engaging visuals can do everything from create a mood to evoke a positive connection to present industry-specific data in an engaging manner.

Not sure where to start? Here are 5 easy ways to start showing, not telling.

1. Send a photo with every press release. 

Were your attorneys named to a "Best Lawyers" list? Be sure to send a photo of the attorney when you issue the press release. Did your office get voted a best place to work? Gather everyone near the (branded) sign and snap a group photo, like Citrin Cooperman's Philadelphia office did here after being named among the Top 100 Places to Work.

2. Hire a professional photographer for events. 

Is your firm sponsoring a charity event, or hosting a grand opening, or having an open house to celebrate an anniversary? Hire a pro to document the occasion. The cost will pay off in the long run when you have professional quality images to share in all of the marketing tactics you surely are implementing to capitalize on the event. When the Hepatitis B Foundation renamed its research institute in honor of Baruch Blumberg, the man who discovered the hepatitis b virus and developed the test and vaccine to combat it, foundation leaders turned to Allure West Studios to commemorate the event. Its future marketing campaigns now have access to photos like this one, of Blumberg's son-in-law Mark Thompson, CEO of the New York Times Co., with the medical bag Blumberg used on his research trips - a bag that helped save millions of lives.

3. Illustrate blog posts.

Many law firms these days have discovered that writing relevant articles about facets of their particular legal niche for a blog page can help them develop into thought leaders in their fields. The writing is just part of the campaign, though. People will spend more time on your page - and in fact are more likely to be drawn in to read it in the first place - if a relevant photo or other illustration accompanies the words. But don't just rush to Google images and take something from there. Be mindful of intellectual property when choosing photographs. You'll be on safer legal ground if you invest in a stock photo or two rather than hope no one notices you stole a photo from a newspaper or other blog.

4. Embrace video.

More than 100 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute of every day. Its 1 billion - with a B - users turn to it for everything from learning how to unclog a sink to checking out the newest preview for The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. The next time your accountants are speaking at a conference or your attorneys are presenting a CLE, arrange for video recording, like the Philadelphia personal injury firm of Feldman Shepherd did when two of its attorneys demonstrated how a house fire that killed two young boys started in a dryer, leading to a products liability lawsuit.



5. Invest in infographics.

The rise in popularity of infographics is no accident. A good infographic takes a jumble of data and reorganizes and presents it in a visually pleasing manner. People who wouldn't invest the time to read paragraphs of information will scan an infographic simply because it entices them to look. Take this example on private attorneys vs. public defenders from Criminal Justice Degree Schools.

As marketing and public relations continues to shift towards visual communications, it becomes even more vital for professional service firms and their marketers to adapt and evolve, too. Thinking visually while executing your next marketing tactic will improve the return on the investment in your marketing efforts, leading to more referrals and business leads and, in the end, increased business development and revenue.