Three years into the generative AI cycle, the early adoption hype has settled into something more useful: a clearer picture of which tools are doing real work in agency operations, which are still in pilot, and which were oversold and quietly shelved. A scan of agency operations
Reputation management has shifted. Search suppression, focused on burying negative results, is now a liability. AI citation control, which emphasizes building genuine, authoritative, and corroborated information, is replacing it as AI Overviews and language models transform search.
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.
Cracker Barrel's 2025 logo rebrand lasted just eight days due to intense customer backlash. This case study examines the crisis, its communications failures, and the significant operational and reputational damage incurred, including an 8% traffic decline and the termination of the design firm's contract.
A 15-hour outage in Amazon Web Services' US-EAST-1 region on October 20, 2025 took down Duolingo, Fortnite, Slack, Peloton, PlayStation Network, Signal, and over 1,000 companies serving more than 4 million users — and converted a previously abstract European digital sovereignty debate into concrete policy action that reshaped EU regulatory posture on cloud infrastructure through 2026.
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
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
A consumer PR program is priced as a monthly retainer, driven by four variables: scope, category risk, team seniority, and program goals. This article outlines 2026 retainer benchmarks and explains how to evaluate PR quotes effectively.
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.
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