Public relations professionals are tasked with keeping their clients in the minds of customers. To accomplish this challenge, we employ an arsenal of weapons that leverage various assets from marketing strategies and advertising campaigns to digital brand identity platforms and old-fashioned storytelling.

However, as this article in The New York Times explains, nothing creates a lasting impression in the mind of the public more than being in their line of vision. It’s all about location. For small business owners, kiosks present an opportunity to be in the middle of the public where customers have 360-degree exposure to the company’s products—all with minimal overhead.

Is this the future of retail public relations? Are storefronts going to be rendered archaic as new, smaller and more nimble businesses gain traction? This same principle happened in the food business, where food trucks revolutionized the restaurant industry by offering customers on the move quality products at reasonable prices. Instead of becoming a destination for customers, food trucks and kiosks go the extra step of meeting people half way. And this makes sense.

Public relations is a competitive, proactive endeavor. Brands and companies should make an effort to be where customers already are, and smaller more mobile venues offer this ability. Perhaps the retail industry is poised for evolutions that food trucks and food carts have already leveraged. And if so, is the public ready for such changes in their shopping habits? Are we ready for a Nike kiosk or Gucci truck outside of our office, or do we still want the traditional shopping mall experience?

“Social listening” — the practice of brands tuning in to what customers are saying to them and about them on social media — is a hot topic, and we’ve talked a lot about the increasing importance of brand responsiveness. While many companies are working to increase and improve their ability to address consumer questions, comments, and concerns via networks like Twitter, some brands are already way ahead of the pack when it comes to engaging their digital followers, and have made great strides of late.

According to Socialbakers, which has been measuring brand responsiveness on Twitter since the fourth quarter of 2012, companies in the finance, airline, and telecom industries dominate the Twitterverse with respect to effective and quick responses (we wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that these industries often make us want to tear our hair out, and therefore have much to gain by providing excellent customer care). While the latest stats prove that these businesses continue to lead the charge, some under-performing industries like retail have recently shown notable improvement.

In fact, every industry studied has shown at least some improvement in their Twitter response rates, demonstrating that brands are recognizing the importance of social media interactions.

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The factory collapse that killed more than 1,100 people in Bangladesh this April is by no means the first tragedy to strike the garment industry in recent years—but it does look like the culmination of an ongoing PR challenge that could reshape the way major clothing brands market their products. The earliest evidence of this change comes on social media, where companies that had operations in the factory have already begun responding to the demands of consumers and labor activists.

The New York Times reports that many businesses and industry groups now plan to follow the food industry’s example by offering the public more detailed information about how and where their clothes are made. H&M and Zara have agreed to sign a new “factory safety accord,” and major names like Disney, Nike, and Walmart may follow with campaigns designed to appropriate the “green,” “organic,” and “fair trade” themes favored by food and household goods marketers in recent years. The purpose of this material, of course, will be to highlight the brands’ corporate social responsibility efforts and distance them from horrific accidents like the one in Bangladesh.

It’s nothing new for fashion: upstarts like American Apparel began using their own “fair trade” practices as key selling points some time ago. Yet, despite AA’s success, retailers like Maggie’s Organics and Everlane (tagline “Luxury Basics. Radical Transparency.”) remain few and far between.

Not for long.

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Every brand on Earth is chomping at the bit to place official ads on the rapidly growing Instagram, but parent company Facebook continues to proceed with extreme caution.

While Mark Zuckerberg says he is very encouraged by the expansion of the image-sharing network, he clearly does not plan to open the commercial floodgates until he’s good and ready. In his own words, Instagram must first focus on “build[ing] community” before determining how best to use its considerable potential as an ad/marketing forum. We can see why Zuckerberg prefers to take low-risk baby steps, no matter how impatient advertisers may be.

In the meantime, brands and their social media teams should be quite happy to learn that they do have more promotional options on Instagram thanks to the newly introduced function “photos of you,” which allows users to tag any other existing account—be it a friend, a celebrity, a local business, or a big-name brand—in their own pics. Amateur lensmen and brand managers alike will receive notifications when others tag them, and they can then choose whether to display these images on their own public feeds.

Can you say “pre-approved user generated content?”

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PR industry experts are inundated with columns and advice about how clients should manage their personal brands. Much of that input is common sense: don’t get coked up and crash your Porsche, don’t beat your girlfriend and land in jail, don’t get drunk and start tweeting. Most of the public is able to avoid these situations. (Thanks, moms.)

Nevertheless, brands love spokespeople. Brands need spokespeople to provide that human element that connects with the complex psychology that is consumer behavior. From Donald Trump to Eva Longoria, personal branding is big business, and a dangerous one, because all humans are fallible. But if there were ever a control in the experiment of personal branding, it would be Tim Tebow. The guy is as clean as a bag of cotton balls.

In fact, Tim Tebow’s personal brand is so sterling that even without a job—he has yet to be picked up by an NFL team after being dropped by the New York Jets—his sponsors aren’t worried at all. ESPN, Nike, TiVo, FRS, Fox Sports and Jockey are all on board with whatever happens next in his career, even if it doesn’t include football. Those brands are even lining up to retain his services after he hangs up his cleats. That’s personal branding done well. But there is more to successful personal branding than avoiding mug shots and visiting children in the hospital.

There is authenticity. Tim Tebow lives according to the values he espouses regardless of what his handlers, agents and PR people do. Tim Tebow runs the Tim Tebow show (which is his life), and his fans adore him for it. In a parallel universe, Charlie Sheen fans feel the same way about his personal brand. For some reason, many PR experts struggle with this idea of authenticity. So do young celebrities like Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus; it’s hard to be authentic when you are still wrestling with who you are and the trappings of becoming an adult. Read more

Chances are you, or someone you know, owns a pair of shoes. Now consider there are currently about 7.078 billion people on earth. That’s how big and lucrative the shoe industry is, and for decades Nike has been at the forefront of shoe sales.

But times changed.

Nike’s original young demographic grew up and had its own kids. Spokesman Michael Jordan retired… twice. Competing brands gained influence. Technology turned the world inside out, and the public began consuming information a la carte instead of off the menu of mainstream television networks and newspapers.

Instead of being a lumpy, amorphous, loosely-defined mass of humanity, the public became a collection of niches. This may be a welcome development if you sell horse magazines or pirate-themed paper plates, but for Nike this changing reality is a big challenge. To reach customers Nike must exploit every channel from Twitter and Facebook to Youtube and traditional television, and it must do it in a way that resonates with the various sensibilities of different niches of people.

That’s hard to do.

Instead of courting famous athletes like Tiger Woods and Lance Armstrong (look how well that turned out), Nike should exploit the new niche reality by going directly to its source: customers. The future of Nike’s brand shouldn’t focus on how far someone can jump from the free throw line, but on health, competition and style—the core interests of its dynamic target demographic.

Or it should go back to selling the original Air Jordans. Those are timeless.

Last week brought news of disgraced general/CIA chief and potential presidential candidate David Petraeus‘s first post-scandal appearance. Petraeus used a speech before a University of Southern California dinner honoring the military to effectively begin his apology tour. We and everyone else in PR are obsessed with damage control, and we feel like Petraeus got it right. Now we’d like to take a moment to relay seven lessons from recent scandal-wracked personalities who didn’t quite get it right.

1. Make it public — but not too public: Whoever told Arnold Schwarzenegger that appearing on every interview show ever to talk about his affairs and his out-of-wedlock child while simultaneously hawking his new book was very wrong.

2. Be humble. Seriously: Jonah Lehrer didn’t get the message that being a public intellectual does not allow you to avoid taking the blame for your own failings by over-intellectualizing the whole thing and pontificating about the why and the how. “I need rules because I don’t trust myself to not be arrogant”? Come on, man.

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The public loves tenacity. We understand that people go through difficult times, and many of those struggles are self-inflicted. But we love a good comeback story because we believe that tough times build character.

We all fall down, and most of us get back up again. It makes us better, more compassionate people. (This is why our Dad made us play soccer even though we had asthma.)

OK, so what’s up with the new Tiger Woods and Nike ad celebrating the golf legend’s recent return to “top dog” status in his sport? It shows Tiger measuring up a putt with the tagline “Winning Takes Care of Everything” over a Nike Swoosh and the word “Victory”. Is that the lesson Tiger learned from his sex-addicted meltdown and subsequent costly — on every level — divorce? Is that what Nike learned from former sponsor and fraud Lance Armstrong?

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If you want to encourage your social media followers to engage and create content for your brand, the secret sauce is quite simple: flattery. Earlier this month, for example, Nike celebrated accumulating its one millionth Instagram follower by featuring a series of ten pics chosen from we don’t even know how many.

Nike didn’t even really have to do all that much. Its team simply chose some user-submitted photos, shared them, and made ten people very, very happy by encouraging tens of thousands of users to “like” their photos and follow them. Most of these pics aren’t even particularly well-composed or creative–they’re just photos of people wearing or holding their shoes. We chose the two best:

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Here’s an interesting fact: 30% of top brands now have “dedicated customer service Twitter handles”. This makes perfect sense, right? Customers value great service above all else, they love the instant gratification of social media and they really, really hate waiting for reps to pick up the phone. Also: by establishing separate Twitter handles for customer service, brands can “divert negative attention and activity” away from the primary feed.

So what goes into running a great customer service operation in the twittersphere? In order to find out, we poked around and found ten examples of brands that are doing it right, starting with some of the biggest.

1. Nike Support: This one is pretty much the gold standard. A quick glance at the account with all replies shows you how quickly and how often the feed’s managers respond to individual customers.

@karolharvill Please take a look at the following FAQ for best practices on calibrating workouts with the app: gonike.me/6019ndnS

— Nike Support (@NikeSupport) March 7, 2013

2. Xbox Support: Xbox boldly claims to hold the Guinness World Record for “most responsive Twitter feed”–and based on the number of replies their team posts every minute, we can see why they make that claim.

@kona570 This what you’re looking for? xbx.lv/mWsFJy^KC

— Xbox Support (1-5) (@XboxSupport) March 7, 2013

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