PR Insights & Public Relations Strategy

ReputationDefender: The Industry's Oldest Name, Now Owned by Norton

ReputationDefender, founded in 2006, largely invented the consumer reputation management industry. Now owned by Gen Digital (Norton, Avast), it offers services including search result improvement, digital privacy, and data-broker removal. The firm recently launched Total Radius, an AI-powered service for public-facing individuals, connecting online data exposure to physical safety risk. This article is part of EPR's profile series on the reputation management industry.

Editorial Team · May 23, 2026

PR Insights & Public Relations Strategy

LinkedIn Thought Leadership: A 2026 Playbook

The platform has gone through several phases. The early professional networking era was about resumes and recruiting. The middle period — roughly 2015 through 2020 — was about content marketing, with brand pages doing most of the publishing work. The current phase, which has been

Editorial Team · May 21, 2026

PR Insights & Public Relations Strategy

Earning Citations in ChatGPT: A Practitioner's Field Guide

The question shows up in nearly every brand strategy meeting now: how do we get ChatGPT to mention us? The honest answer is more useful than the marketing-pitch version. Here is what the available evidence supports about how citations get made and what communications teams can ac

Editorial Team · May 21, 2026

PR Insights & Public Relations Strategy

When a Consumer Brand Needs PR: The Three-Gate Readiness Test

A consumer brand is ready for PR when it passes three gates: a real story, a product ready for demand, and at least six months of sustained budget. Failing any gate wastes PR spend because PR compounds over time — it does not produce thirty-day revenue, and it cannot fix a weak product or replace a sales function.

Editorial Team · May 20, 2026

PR Insights & Public Relations Strategy

What Terakeet's Epstein-Linked Scandal Reveals About How Reputation Management Really Works

The Terakeet investigation into an Epstein-linked scandal offers a rare look into the inner workings of reputation management, exposing a standard operating procedure that involves search engineering, content production, and SEO to manage visibility rather than address underlying issues.

Editorial Team · May 20, 2026

PR Insights & Public Relations Strategy

When Image Outruns Judgment — The Fragility of Alcohol Marketing in the Digital Age

Alcohol marketing in the digital age is fraught with peril. This article explores how misjudgments and a lack of narrative control can lead to spectacular failures, using recent controversies involving Bud Light and BrewDog as illustrative examples. The piece emphasizes the delicate balance between creativity, ethics, and public perception brands must navigate.

Editorial Team · May 20, 2026

PR Insights & Public Relations Strategy

How to Pitch a Newsletter Writer in 2026

The independent newsletter has gone from media curiosity to standard publishing model in roughly a decade. Substack, Beehiiv, Ghost, and the long tail of newsletter platforms now host outlets that, individually, have audiences smaller than major publications but, in aggregate, ac

Editorial Team · May 20, 2026

PR Insights & Public Relations Strategy

What Is Consumer PR? Definition, Channels, and 2026 Cost Benchmarks

Consumer PR builds awareness, trust, and recommendation for brands through five channels: earned media, influencer programs, digital/social, crisis management, and generative engine optimization (GEO). Unlike advertising, consumer PR earns third-party credibility.

Editorial Team · May 19, 2026

PR Insights & Public Relations Strategy

Why AI Systems Trust Certain Sources

Article explores the five mechanics that explain why AI systems trust certain sources over others, including identification, extractability, corroboration, recency, and independence. It explains why machine readability matters, why structured databases win, why corroboration builds retrieval confidence, and why forums and reviews are often favored by AI.

Editorial Team · May 19, 2026

PR Insights & Public Relations Strategy

How AI Website Builders Are Changing PR Agencies

AI website builders let PR agencies — and their clients — produce campaign microsites, press rooms, and landing pages in hours instead of weeks, without a web developer. This shifts agency value away from production speed and toward strategy, judgment, and the work…

Editorial Team · May 19, 2026