United Airlines EVP of communications and advertising Josh Earnest at Axios Communicators event in NYC on Dec. 14. Photo: Steven Duarte on behalf of Axios
Axios convened top communicators at a recent event in NYC to learn what's in store for the profession in 2024.
Here are some words of wisdom to take into the new year...
✈️ United Airlines EVP of communications and advertising Josh Earnest on the importance of rapid response:
"There definitely have been times where information was coming in on social media that helped inform operational decisions," Earnest said.
He added the airline more often sees "weird things on social media" or its public relations team gets calls about incidents, and "having a direct line to the people who are running the operation of the airline is critical to our ability to respond in a timely fashion."
📱Crisis communication expert Molly McPherson on social media's influence:
"Traditional media used to control most of the narrative, but now the public, when they mobilize together and quickly, have such tremendous power. ... That's what's changed."
🎮Activision Blizzard EVP corporate affairs and chief communications officer Lulu Cheng Meservey on crisis comms:
"I think about communications as a counterinsurgency strategy of waging a campaign to win hearts and minds," she said.
"If you are able to sharpen your message to a point and refine it to reach a precise type of person with the precise thing that's going to make them just stay awake at 3am to think about it, that's going to puncture through."
"We all have insane information overload, so if you try to spread yourself too thin and you're saying 10 different things to appeal to everyone, people are just going to forget about it."
