POSTED BY Chloe Lane

The pop girlies are having a moment this year. Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan and Charli XCX can all teach us a thing or two about effective PR campaigns.

Imagine you’re a journalist on a tight deadline. You might be working on a trend piece for a globally-read magazine, planning an upcoming podcast recording, or perhaps reporting on a news story for a national daily newspaper. Your draft is due tomorrow, but you urgently need an expert comment to include. Where do you go?

From multinational corporations to pop singers to business schools, no reputation is ever static. A brand’s reputation is fluid and ever-changing – just look at Taylor Swift.

Thought leadership is a phrase that is often thrown around in the business sphere. To be a thought leader essentially means being an expert in a specific area and positioning yourself as someone people look to for advice on that topic.

As a university or business school looking to get your alumni, research and professors featured in media opportunities, trade press can sometimes feel like an afterthought, particularly when your focus is on top-tier publications like the Financial Times, Forbes and the Economist.

Although 18 percent of journalists say their relationships with PR professionals have improved over the past year, 16 percent has said the relationship has gotten worse, according to Cision’s 2023 Global State of the Media Report. So, as a communications professional, you need to make sure you’re getting it right when it comes to working with journalists.

Chances are, at some point in your career, someone will Google you. While you can’t ever completely control what appears at the top of the search engine results page, you can help to shape what information is available about you online. This can be done by building a strong personal brand.