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Tackling Ebola in 2015: Better PR is Needed to Help Manage Crisis

By Debra Zimmerman Murphey

I have both a professional and personal interest in the Ebola crisis. As someone with journalism and healthcare public relations (PR) experience – and as the daughter of a career foreign service officer who lived in Western Africa – I’ve watched as the world has cumulatively crawled toward a response.

When I was a year old, my family moved to Nigeria and lived outside Lagos. It was the 1960s and my father’s first tour with the State Department. During that time, taking an antimalarial medication was a routine part of our lives. We also lived in Nigeria when the Biafran War began. As a child, I had no way of knowing that the latter would end up being one of numerous conflicts, not including many public-health challenges, that would plague the world’s second-largest continent.

Now, decades later, I am mindful that the thousands of Ebola victims in Western Africa, and the comparably few in America, crystallize that there are times when mankind should think globally, act locally, and speak with one compassionate voice.

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Posted Tobin Communications

Why PR Pros Shouldn’t Neglect Audio

By Debra Zimmerman Murphey

Welcome to Tobin Communications, Inc.’s new “PR Podcast” series. Through these audio interviews, we’re asking experts to provide compelling viewpoints that we hope will get you thinking differently about how content and communications are leveraged in today’s competitive – and often time-sensitive, cyclical or trend-affected – information environment.

Today, we focus on the impact of audio, which takes on so many definitions and applications for the au courant media consumer, from the ubiquitous streaming tune and NPR’s Weekend Edition, to iHeartRadio, an effort so successful it inspired Clear Channel’s recent rebranding to iHeartMedia. Audio is convenient (the eyes may be doing other things) and a jumping-off point for many ways that consumers interface with brands, companies, organizations, people, newsmakers and opinion-leaders. Even the popular TED Talks are available in both video and audio.

In Maury Tobin’s podcast interview with veteran media strategist, Mark Ramsey, you’ll find out that the takeaway for those in public relations is to stay mindful that listening to audio programming of all kinds, particularly through smartphones, now dominates much of the activities of a mobile-centric society. In fact, eMarketer predicted that U.S. adults will spend 23 percent more time with mobile devices on an average day in 2014 than the year prior.

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