In The News
By Felicia Knight
Corporate image building, whether or not you’re in the Fortune 500, is paramount to the success of your company. That’s obvious. What might not be as apparent is that your business’s image can be influenced by factors as random as what your employees post on social media, the use of ad blockers and those unforeseen “Jared”-type incidents.
By Felicia Knight
We all know what this coming weekend is, right? It’s the unofficial start of summer, of course. (The Knight Canney Group is a Maine public relations firm, so around these parts, we know it as the unofficial start of the summer tourist season.) That’s how the innkeepers, hoteliers, restaurateurs, and gift shop owners know it too. The petroleum industry, the airlines, Amtrak, and Greyhound know it as the start of the summer travel season.
Memorial Day weekend is second only to Thanksgiving weekend as an economic harbinger of seasonal retail madness.
By Felicia Knight
The golden rule of public relations, political campaigns, and crisis management is “control the narrative.” It’s hard enough to create and maintain an image, but once the competition or the opposition has defined who you are and hammered that message home, it’s doubly hard to bounce back.
Just ask the folks at SeaWorld. For years, SeaWorld had done an excellent job of defining itself as synonymous with Orcas. Sure, SeaWorld had sharks and dolphins, concerts and roller coasters, but Orcas are what paid the bills. SeaWorld defined these oceanic giants not as menacing apex predators, but as kissing, cooing, dancing, huggable friends of humans. Pandas with fins.
Originally published in the Bangor Daily News
Fortunately, this challenge comes at a time when new renewable energy technologies are poised to drive demand for biomass both in the U.S. and abroad. So our forests are well-positioned to nurture growth and well-paying jobs in both export opportunities, with the state-of-the-art bulk conveyor system at the Port of Eastport, and with the development of home-grown green energy production in Maine.
By Felicia Knight
The recent revelation in the New York Times that author James Bradley is now convinced that his father is not in the iconic Joe Rosenthal photo of the raising of the American flag on Iwo Jima brings to mind our many comments on the importance of good story telling in public relations. Especially the part about how it should be a true story.
The World War II photo of five marines and a Navy corpsman raising the flag on Mt. Suribachi was an instant balm on America’s wounds of war. And it has been subject to both celebration and scrutiny ever since. Joe Rosenthal was both awarded a Pulitzer Prize and accused of staging the scene. While it was—and is—a symbol of victory and patriotism, the fact is, the photo was used to illustrate a story that was a public relations boon to the U.S. war effort.
