Before establishing Health Beat, its multiple award-winning blog, Spectrum Health leaned heavily on traditional marketing channels to reach its audiences. A substantial research initiative led Spectrum’s communicators to realize that the missing content marketing component was necessary. For taking this mandate and developing the gold standard of health care blogs, Spectrum Health has won first place in the “Blog” category of PR Daily’s 2019 Digital Marketing & Social Media Awards.

The research included a competitive analysis, internal and external surveys, focus groups and an in-depth content and communications asset audit. In addition to developing the blog as a means of delivering content, the team also developed Health Beat Pro, targeting content to media professionals. The most compelling items are shared through weekly, monthly and special edition e-news to subscribers who are able to tailor their news feeds to suit their interests.

The company has adopted a newsroom approach to creating and delivering the content, with a team that includes a managing editor, a multimedia manager, two photojournalists and a health care journalist. Contributions also come from freelancers and marketing/communications staff members.

Health Beat stands out because of both the quality of the content and the results it achieves. The blog’s contents reach 15 million people monthly; its social media reach has exceeded 100 million people averaging 700,000 site visits each month. The time spent on stories sometimes reaches as much as 22 minutes. The content also finds its way into the press, while internally it is repurposed across multiple channels.

Congratulations to the team of Cheryl Welch, Jill Seidelman, Chris Clark, Sue Thoms and Taylor Ballek.

Kite Hill PR LLC has expanded its offerings since its 2013 founding from its original niches—martech and adtech—to newer offerings in media/publishing, B2B innovation and entertainment tech industries. Kite Hill has also expanded its view of its role as a PR agency, recognizing that media relations has become just one part of an effective public relations offering. Based on that recognition, the agency has developed expertise in content production and events. To drive awareness of its brand, Kite Hill launched Communication Week, a weeklong series of educational and social events aimed at the media, communications and marketing industries. Since 2014, the agency has expanded the event, which this year attracted some 350 participants.

With expertise in strategic communication, digital, integrated marketing, social media, media training, video production and traditional PR services, you might think Landis Communications is a large agency. It’s not. The work produced by the agency’s 15 staffers includes initiatives for the Save the Redwoods League, designed to build brand awareness and raise money. The resulting multimonth campaign generated more than 2,500 placements, attracted thousands of new email newsletter subscriptions and drew attention to a gala that raised more than $2 million. For On Lok, a senior health center, the agency sought not only awareness and donations but also participation in its programs and services—results Landis delivered through appearances in the news cycle, heightened awareness of fundraising events and fostering interpersonal relationships, among other tactics.

The team at Scott Circle Communications is able to navigate the halls of Congress and the bureaucratic mazes of government agencies. Combined with its listen-first approach and its ability to target messages to precisely the right audiences, its clients have included the National League of Cities, which reached out to Scott Circle when it learned that the Veterans Administration (VA) had been directed to shift $460 million of its budget from a homeless program to local VA hospitals for “discretionary” use. The League was counting on Scott Circle to instigate resistance to the decision and lead to a reconsideration of the cuts. The team was able to reach out to The Washington Post with an exclusive before the story broke. Despite being scooped by Politico, the Post reporter was still able to demand a response, resulting in a reversal of the decision to cut funding.

Brand Definition is an agency that understands itself. Founded in 2010, it was established to do precisely what its name suggests: Define the brands of the organizations it represents. The agency employs a multichannel approach to its work, but never gets too comfortable with the channels it uses. One way the agency stays fresh is with an annual retreat in the Cascades. Dubbed “Advance,” the retreat is a chance for the team to celebrate, but also to talk candidly about challenges and how to address them in order to evolve and improve, both in terms of the work it does for clients and for the experience it delivers to its own employees.

The United States Department of Veterans Affairs is one of the largest organizations in the U.S. government, large enough that it’s Information Technology unit (OIT) has its own communication team, IT Strategic Communication (ITSC). The team’s stakeholders include VA and OIT senior leadership and employees, the U.S. Congress, IT-focused media, veterans and the public. One of ITSC’s most recent undertakings was the production of five videos that make up the 2018 Midyear Review. The videos feature 27 OIT employees on location in VA facilities around the country, showcasing their hard work, dedication and commitment to bettering the experience of VA employees and enabling the VA to provide seamless access to care and benefits for veterans. The team produced 14 hours of footage, edited down to nine minutes for distribution, driving a nearly 35% increase in intranet traffic and contributing to higher levels of engagement (based on results of the organization’s all-employee survey).

Global marketing communications at Kraton Corporation is a five-person team, serving two business units in the 2,000-employee company that produces styrenic block copolymers (an alternative to rubber) and sustainability-friendly pine chemicals. The global firm relies on the team for virtually all of its marketing efforts; except for trade show booth design, the company uses no external or third-party marketing services. In 2018, the team executed more than 200 marcomms projects, including 39 tradeshows and special events, 55 pieces of owned media content, 73 earned media content items, 24 paid content items and the launch of a new corporate website.  The results of these efforts produced a 53% increase in LinkedIn followers, a 58% improvement in favorable media mentions, a 52% increase in monthly web site visitors and 722 sales leads from the website and 1,500 from trade shows.

The PayPal corporate affairs team, made up of nearly 100 full-time employees from around the world, is responsible for communications, reputation and risk management, government relations and social innovation. Part of the broader business affairs function (which also includes HR and legal), the team brings together formerly dispersed teams, enabling greater collaboration and leading to improvements in how it serves both internal and external stakeholders. One of the most notable examples of the team’s communications success is Walmart, where for $3, customers can load and withdraw money from their PayPal accounts. To promote the partnership, the team followed a press release distribution with a Facebook Live event. A video was syndicated through owned and executive social channels, turning neutral coverage into positive reports from top-tier outlets. The team secured 27 satellite TV and radio interviews and more than 340 million impressions.

As the international engineering firm Syska Hennessy approached its 90^th anniversary, its marketing program was a shambles. Several team members had left; those who remained had limited industry experience. The company hired Michelle Galindez, who convinced leadership to abandon its approach to marketing—with communicators engaged in marketing only part-time—in favor of her preferred internal agency. She moved to hire staff with extensive experience. One of the team’s first tasks was to refresh Syska Hennessy’s brand. An audit suggested the existing brand was out of step with the company’s message and vision. Working with a London-based agency, the team collaborated on a refresh that retained the logo as brand’s cornerstone while focusing on the company’s people. The refresh catalyzed changes in messaging, graphics, the company’s website and social media channels, and marketing collateral.

Nicor Gas has supported United Way for nearly 65 years. In 2017, that relationship hit a bump in the road when 10% of the employees left the organization—most through retirement—taking with them their longtime commitment to United Way and resulting in a 20% loss in total employee contributions. The two-person internal communication staff rebranded the campaign through a partnership with the United Way internal employee committee, identifying a series of challenges and brainstorming creative solutions that included new employee education aimed at newer employees and communications targeting field employees, which accounts for most of the company’s staff. By the time the campaign ended, 120 new employees had donated, with 10 donating $1,000 or more.

Mahul Brahma has experience in every kind of media. He has been a senior editor at the Economic Times, Reuters, DNA, The New York Times’ India partner and CNBC TV18, among others. This experience has positioned him well to coordinate communication on behalf of mjunction, a Tata group company which manages the electronic auction of steel and coal, along with auctioning 2G spectrum, oil fields, ocean vessel chartering, food grains, media rights and more. Each of the business units acts autonomously, rendering a holistic view of the company difficult. Brahma was up to the challenge, creating a niche for mjunction as the largest B2B ecommerce player in India. In only a year, the media got on board, and the biggest B2B ecommerce player in India label is now the company’s brand identity.

J.J. Colao founded Haymaker Group in 2014, with no previous PR experience, and funded the business with credit card debt in its earliest days. The agency now boasts a staff of five professionals, and clients like Grubhub, Etsy, Handy, and SeatGeek. Prior to founding Haymaker, Colao worked as a young staff-writer at Forbes, where he cranked out more than 35 magazine stories, 200 web articles, four features, and a cover story, along with a variety of video interviews featuring subjects like Sean “Diddy” Combs and AOL founder Steve Case. At Haymaker, he has built the firm by consistently delivering extraordinary results for clients. When he’s not managing Haymaker, Colao also finds time to mentor Columbia University entrepreneurs and run the New York Media Meetup, an 1100-member organization that hosts reporters from outlets like The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and The New Yorker to discuss the craft and business of media.

Carmen Collins has been the leader of Cisco Systems’ WeAreCisco program for four years, promoted in 2018 to become senior social media and talent brand manager and lead the global team in its various activities. The earliest social media outreach effort focused on Snapchat, which was the most popular social media app among the college students at the heart of Cisco’s recruiting efforts. In 2018, though, following a successful Summer of Interns campaign, she retired the @WeAreCisco Snapchat account to focus on Instagram. The team has embarked on a number of campaigns through its social media properties, including one that tapped into the excitement of Star Wars Day (May the 4^th), which featured (through a partnership with NASDAQ) employee entries displayed on the NASDAQ Tower in Times Square.

Grace Keith did not plan to be a communicator. She started out as a business analyst for a financial trading platform, but her work demonstrated an affinity for communication, and she joined the company’s newly formed in-house marketing team. After guiding the organization through two rebrands in five years (and lacking any formal PR training), she was asked by the CEO to bring the firm’s PR efforts in-house and to manage the unit. Later, she joined the Thomson Reuters PR team and managed PR for global businesses and technology platforms, focusing her efforts on the financial media. Now, at only 33 years of age, Keith is president of Caliber Corporate Advisers, a financial, fintech and professional services PR firm. She is sought after by the media for commentary on topics like crisis communication. As a lifetime member of NYU’s Stern Women in Business group, she devotes time to addressing the underrepresentation of women in corporate finance.

Mark Miller was introduced to policy communication while working at the National Governors Association, where he was inspired to join Governor Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign. After serving in senior communications positions at the White House and the Corporation for National Service during the Clinton Administration, Miller made his mark in other mission-driven organizations, including a stint as the Case Foundation’s first vice president of communication and a leadership role at Children’s National Health System—all of which led him to his current position at the de Beaumont Foundation, a private charitable organization focused on public health. Miller joined the Foundation as its first vice president of communication, and within his first year he set and achieved the goals of building the Foundation’s visibility, reach and influence; creating consistent and impactful messaging for staff, board, partners and external communications; and updating the Foundation’s positioning to improve its relevance for a wider audience. His digital strategies and content planning more than doubled the Foundation’s web traffic and social media engagement, which continue to grow. Not content to produce stellar results for his employer, Miller is also a founding board member and communications director for the American Special Hockey Association and served as a state advocacy coordinator for Autism Speaks, among other volunteer activities.